Solanah: Everyone will give you a different answer, but I define it as anything made approximately 20-80 years from now. Antique is anything older than 80 years old, and newer than 20 is second hand.
DG: Who does wearing vintage appeal to?
Solanah: A variety of different people, whether they are interested in alternative fashion or want to outwardly express their interest in nostalgia.
DG: What do you think of mixing vintage and contemporary pieces? Do you ever wear contemporary outfits?
Solanah: I love it, and yes, I do! Though the farther I get into vintage fashion, the more difficult it is for me to mix decades. I admire it on other people, but often find myself feeling a bit “off”. Lately I’ve been trying for a more classic look by mixing vintage and modern garments. And I do wear modern jeans and cozy sweaters pretty regularly. I’ve been loving some classic/modern fashions lately and hope to balance some with my vintage wear.
DG: Beyond the character of any specific garment, is there something glamorous about the idea of “vintage”?
Solanah: There is something glamorous about vintage, and I think it reaches back to the image women used to live up to. It was very glam, very ideal, especially if you’re talking about the mid-century. Even in camping gear women were supposed to be perfectly coiffed and pretty. At that time it was oppressive, but I think women are starting to own glamorization again. They choose it because it makes them feel good, not because they are expected to be glamorous 24/7.
DG: You’ve said that you “love to be authentic” in your style. What makes your style authentic?
Solanah: For me it means “real.” Not so much about having all the items in an outfit perfect, right down to the correct dates, but more of wearing things the way women wore them originally. And wearing what they really wore, not what Hollywood portrayed. I love slacks, and sweaters with the sleeves rolled up, and comfortable shoes like loafers and flat boots. For me, that’s authentic, because I feel more connected to the everyday woman.
DG: Some people treat vintage as an overall fashion look, some as a lifestyle, and some as simply the characteristic of a given piece. What’s your approach?
Solanah: I would say a little of each! For me it can and often does take over my entire outfit, and others it’s and accent, or a nod to yesteryear. As far as lifestyle goes, I have adapted some old fashioned ways of life into the modern world.
DG: What does dressing in vintage mean to different groups of people? To you?
Solanah: It can mean very different and often opposing things to different people. Some people, mostly those in western religious communities, view it as a traditional, and modest form of dress. It re-enforces traditional gender rolls. This situation seems like a minority.
For the most part vintage is a rebellion against the negative aspects of modern society. Not to be confused with completely turning back the clock, but rather bringing forward the attractive, and leaving the negative behind. Lately fashion had quite a few hiccups, when viewed objectively it’s so confusing and really has no collective foundation. I think people crave clarity and originality, and vintage fulfills that. It’s also something that is obtainable for all social classes, it can be found in high end boutiques, or discount thrift stores.
DG: What are some of your favorite vintage garments?
Solanah: Casual wear is my favorite find. Slacks, denim, sweaters, and coat. Though I have a huge and never ending collection of 1940s hats, I just can’t say no to them.
DG: In 20 years, today’s clothes will be vintage, at least by some definitions. Can you imagine yourself wearing any of them in 2033?
Solanah: This is a really tough question, because on one hand we have so much in terms of clothing, it’s difficult to imagine it being treated the same way we treat vintage clothing today. Right now much of our decades of clothing is rare. It was made of natural fibers, which can decay and be recycled, these garments have an expiration date. But clothing today is completely different. The fibers are so synthesized or combined with natural fibers, there really is no organic circle of life for these garments. We’ll have them for much longer than what we’ve been previously accustomed to, and I think they may come back into our wardrobes as necessity more than anything. What else are we going to do with all these garments? They won’t die.
DG: Is wearing vintage more popular among younger people (however you want to define “younger”)? If so, why?
Solanah: I think simply because people don’t want to look like they’re still wearing fashions from their heyday. It can be difficult to pull off, but honestly I think the older you get, the better you can wear vintage! I’ll always remember an elderly woman I saw walking down the street who was dressed to the nines in a 60s suit, pillbox hat, and matching gloves, pumps, and purse. She was the best!
DG: What’s your favorite era? Is that because of the styles, the history, the culture, or some combination?
Solanah: My favorite era can be defined as the years controlled by the second world war. It appeals to me for so many reasons, much of it not being fashion related. Mostly to do with the short taste of liberation women experienced, and the strength they showcased before being forced back into the home. I admire what they did with what little they had, and how they dealt with the hardships and tragedies. This was reflected in the styles adapted, I really love the make do and mend and DIY aspect of the war era, as it’s something I can be creative with.
DG: You’re well known not only for writing about vintage fashion but for modeling it in fashion shoots on your own site and also for the store you used to work for (that’s actually how I first became aware of you). What’s the secret to a good vintage fashion picture? How important are the poses you strike to how you feel about the outfit?
Solanah: In our shoots we tried to emulate a lot of original fashion portraits from magazines and ads. They really showcased the garments well, and I think there’s a certain strength in “striking a pose”, rather than the very casual, candid poses we see a lot of today.
DG: What do people who wear vintage fashion have in common (if anything)?
Solanah: The most obvious is a love for the past, but I have found many vintage enthusiasts are very involved in various forms of fantasy, fiction, and escapism. Or “geeky” interests, if I could put it simply. Fantastical television shows and movies, comic books, anything that diverts away from the confines of the modern world. I think it has to do with how different people deal with the pressures of modern living, there are those who adapt well and embrace it, and those who need to step back and slow down.
DG: Wearing vintage every day seems like a lot of work--just for the hair styling alone. What’s the most challenging part? Time-consuming? Satisfying?
Solanah: It can look as though that’s the case, but compared to a modern woman’s beauty regimen, it probably takes about the same amount of time and effort. Most vintage wearing women do wet sets at night and wake up with curls. Whereas a non-vintage woman might spend most of her morning curling or straightening her hair with a heat device. When I do that it takes me about a minute or two to do my hair in the morning, but looks like it took an hour. It takes the same amount of time to get dressed comparatively, and I keep my makeup simple: tinted moisturizer, eyeliner, powder, lipstick. I do love getting dressed up, in stockings and hats, and heels for lunch with friends or a cocktail party. Feeling that kind of glamorous is nice every now and then, the kind where you really put in effort and it shows.
DG: Who inspires your look?
Solanah: Fellow vintage lovers, WWII women workers, old family photos, really any “real” people. I don’t take much inspiration from the airbrushed publicity shots of movie stars, because that type of style just isn’t a huge part of my lifestyle.
DG: Who do you consider glamorous?
Solanah: The type of women who has a certain something alluring and enchanting. She doesn’t necessarily have to look glamorous, or live a glamorous life, but she does hold her head high and has the confidence of an individual in charge of their own life and loving it.
DG: What’s your most glamorous place?
Solanah: My dressing table is my most glamorous place. It’s where the magic happens.
Glamour icon? London-based model, DJ, and scene-maker Alejandro Gocast is making an impressive go at that status. I first stumbled across Gocast on Facebook, as part of the revived New Romantic club scene in London that I’ve long admired and written about here on DeepGlamour. Arising in the early 1980s, the New Romantics represented a creative, dressed-to-impress music and style movement, post-punk, post-disco. Now, more than 30 years later, Gocast is one of a new generation of New Romantic club kids. And he cuts a spectacular image in modeling and club photos. I interviewed him exclusively for DeepGlamour.
CH: How do you describe what
you do? I think of you as a model, a glamorous nightclub personality, and a DJ.
But give DG a fuller picture of what you do?
Gocast: I would describe my
career as an eclectic one. As well as being known for what you have mentioned
in the London
scene, I also have a career in luxury events management. My life is not a
simple one.It can be challenging at
times keeping up with schedules, appointments, club nights, friends, family—the
list is endless, but then again life is for the living.
CH: Where are you from? Your Model Mayhem profile
says you are from Latin America, with parents
of Mexican and German descent, respectively. How old were you when you
moved to Britain?
Gocast: That is one tricky
question. I am actually British, although I was born in Mexico. I have
lived in London
since a very young age. However, my mother language is Spanish, therefore (unfortunately)
I do not have the honor of speaking with an English accent. My “genetic”
background has indeed German from my dad’s side and Mexican from my mother’s. I
hope this all makes sense.
CH: You have such a
distinct look, one that I would describe as exotic and androgynous. Not
what most people might think of as a typical male model. How would you describe
your style image? And how did you discover and develop that image? (Did you get started in the new New Romantic club scene in London, or was it some
other inspiration?)
Gocast: My image definitely
started in the London
club scene. I used to go out to “normal” clubs and bars, but always feeling
that I was not quite suitable for them, I started to look for a more arty
environment and played around with different looks, which I still do. Since I
have always had a thing for the New Romantic style, I decided to become “re-born”
into a new way, more in sync with my inner personality and my personal opinion
in life, which is a very simple one: be who you are.
CH: What are the Blitz Kids?
Gocast: The Blitz Kids were a group of young people who
frequented the Blitz nightclub in Covent Garden, London
in the very early 1980s and are credited with launching the New Romantic
cultural movement. Among their number is a good friend of mine, Steve Strange,
also Boy George
and his friends Marilyn and Alice Temple, Perri Lister,
Princess
Julia, Philip Sallon, Carl Teper and Martin
Degville (later to be the frontman of Tony James's Sigue Sigue
Sputnik). The club was known for its outrageous style of clothes and
make-up for both sexes, while it was also the birthplace of several pop groups.
There is an official website for this, on which I actually also feature, you
can visit it here.
CH: What musicians and bands
are atop your current playlist? What musicians and bands are lifelong
favorites?
Gocast: I have a wide range of
taste when it comes down to music, and also quite extreme. I go from hardcore
metal to Kate Bush. My personal music player is full of extremes. I do not
really focus my attention to one artist or band. Since you asked, a few on my
playlists at the moment are Garbage, JLo, Amanda Lear, Tribal House, Korn, Dead
or Alive, Donna Summer, Kate Bush, Siouxie and the Banshees… see what I mean?
CH: You've worked with
numerous artists and designers. Perhaps one of my favorite of your
collaborations has been with Marko
Mitanovski, a favorite designer of Lady Gaga. When I first viewed his
fashions, I was truly astonished - they are strange and intriguing and elegant. Anthropomorphic creatures in black and white. How did you come to
model for Mitanovski?
Gocast: I met Marko at one of
my clubs, “THE FACE.” He was a guest there, and the moment we met we knew we
would be working together. It was the right chemistry and we also get along
really well. It is indeed a pleasure to work with him. I can’t wait for his
next collection! I love his dramatic design style.
CH: Is there a designer
you wear most often right now?
Gocast: I wear a lot of
pieces from various artists, and it is just a question of blending and matching
them to create my night-out style. I recently worked with Dane Goulding,
who designed for the Spice Girls. He has some truly amazing pieces.
CH: You've been in a few
fashion-art short films. I thought "The
Dionysian" released in 2011 was really beautiful, and you looked darkly
enchanting wearing lace and a high collar. And enormous spidery eyelashes. What
was that experience like? What sort of direction were you given in the film, in
terms of posing or projecting a certain image?
Gocast: This film was shot in London, in December. It
was a very cold night and the director knew exactly what he wanted. Since we
shared the same vision, I fit perfectly in the film. This film is going to an
exhibition in Paris
this year. I have worked behind and in front and the camera for a few years
now, and the experience is always the same for me, exciting and always looking
forward to seeing the final creation.
CH: You starred in another
fashion/art film called "Perform
Nijinsky," which was produced by the very talented cabaret performer Mr. Pustra. Clearly the film was something
of an homage to the early 20th-century Ballet Russes legend, Vaslav
Nijinsky. Can you tell DG more about that film project?
Gocast: Pustra is a good
friend and I am also an admirer of his work. Together with Dorota Mulczynska, the
vision of a morphed early 20th Century Ballet Russes was created into a
short film, celebrating and honoring Nijinsky.
CH: Do you often do your own
make up for photo shoots and club nights? Or do you more often work with a make
up artist?
Gocast: For photo shoots I do
work closely with Stephanie
Stokkvik, a Norwegian high fashion make up artist. I have learned so much
from her. If you have time, have a look for her on the net—she is amazing! When
I go out, I normally “paint my face” on my own.
CH: Who is your top style
icon?
Gocast: I am afraid I do not
have one.
CH: When you travel around on
everyday errands, to the grocery and laundromat and whatnot, how do you look
and dress?
Gocast: You would not
recognize me, that’s all I call say. I try to go under the radar when out and
about on my personal life in order to give some space to myself and my
close friends and family.
CH: When you aren't
working, what do you do for fun?
Gocast: I am a bit of a geek.
I own a PS3 and a whole bunch of games. I enjoy also watching horror movies
with friends.
CH: What is your dream
vacation destination?
Gocast: My other half loves
traveling, and I have been lucky to have been to and seen some amazing tropical
paradises. My favorite places.
CH: Do you have favorite
perfumes/colognes?
Gocast: Yes, I am currently
about to finish “Un Jardin Sur Le Nil” by Hermès, and my next fragrance will be from Diptyque Paris.
CH: What are your go-to make
up and skin care products?
Gocast: Any good moisturizer
does, really, not any favorites in particular.
CH: What professional goals do
you set for yourself? Are there particular photographers, artists, or
designers you long to work with? Or, do you have something else in mind
quite different from what you are doing now?
Gocast: I am shooting a few
more fashion films this upcoming year and planning on starting some sketches
for my own collection. However, I must keep this under wraps. I am pretty much
open to work with anyone - as long as the chemistry is there, anything is
possible.
CH: What are your New Years
Eve plans?
Gocast: I am spending New Years
Eve with a good friend of mine. She runs a club in Bricklane, from which I will
also be throwing another infamous club night soon. It is a very intimate
space with limited capacity, which is just what I like.
Glamorous
icon? London-based model, DJ, and scene-maker Alejandro Gocast is making an
impressive go at that status. I first stumbled across Gocast on Facebook, as
part of the revived New Romantic club scene in London that I’ve long admired and written
about here on Deepglamour. Arising in the early 1980s, the New Romantics represented
a creative, well-dressed, well-coiffed music and style movement, post-punk, post-disco.
Now, some 30 years later, Gocast is one of a new generation of New Romantic
club kids. And he’s spectacular image in photos. I interviewed him exclusively
for Deepglamour.
CH: How do you describe what
you do? I think of you as a model, a glamorous nightclub personality, and a DJ.
But give DG a fuller picture of what you do?
Gocast: I would describe my
career as an eclectic one. As well as being known for what you have mentioned
in the London
scene, I also have a career in luxury events management. My life is not a
simple one.It can be challenging at
times keeping up with schedules, appointments, club nights, friends, family - the
list is endless, but then again life is for the living.
CH: Where are you from?
Your Model Mayhem profile
says you are from Latin America, with parents
of Mexican and German descent, respectively. How old were you when you
moved to Britain?
Gocast: That is one tricky
question. I am actually British, although I was born in Mexico. I have
lived in London
since a very young age. However, my mother language is Spanish, therefore (unfortunately)
I do not have the honor of speaking with an English accent. My “genetic”
background has indeed German from my dad’s side and Mexican from my mother’s. I
hope this all makes sense.
CH: You have such a
distinct look, one that I would describe as exotic and androgynous. Not
what most people might think of as a typical male model. How would you describe
your style image? And how did you discover and develop that image?
(Did you get started in the new New Romantic club scene in London, or was it some
other inspiration?)
Gocast: My image definitely
started in the London
club scene. I used to go out to “normal” clubs and bars, but always feeling
that I was not quite suitable for them, I started to look for a more arty
environment and played around with different looks, which I still do. Since I
have always had a thing for the New Romantic style, I decided to become “re-born”
into a new way, more in sync with my inner personality and my personal opinion
in life, which is a very simple one: be who you are.
CH: What musicians and bands
are atop your current playlist? What musicians and bands are lifelong
favorites?
Gocast: I have a wide range of
taste when it comes down to music, and also quite extreme. I go from hardcore
metal to Kate Bush. My personal music player is full of extremes. I do not
really focus my attention to one artist or band. Since you asked, I a few of my
playlists at the moment are Gargabe, JLo, Amanda Lear, Tribal House, Korn, Dead
or Alive, Donna Summer, Kate Bush, Siouxie and the Banshees… see what I mean?
CH: You've worked with
numerous artists and designers. Perhaps one of my favorite of your
collaborations has been with Marko
Mitanovski, a favorite designer of Lady Gaga. When I first viewed his
fashions, I was truly astonished - they are strange and intriguing and elegant.
Anthropomorphic creatures in black and white. How did you come to
model for Mitanovski?
Gocast: I met Marko at one of
my clubs, “THE FACE.” He was a guest there, and the moment we met we knew we
would be working together. It was the right chemistry and we also get along
really well. It is indeed a pleasure to work with him. I can’t wait for his
next collection! I love his dramatic design style.
CH: Is there a designer
you wear most often right now?
Gocast: I wear a lot of
pieces from various artists, and it is just a question of blending and matching
them to create my night-out style. I recently worked with Dane Goulding,
who designed for the Spice Girls. He has some truly amazing pieces.
CH: You've been in a few
fashion-art short films. I thought "The
Dionysian" released in 2011 was really beautiful and you looked darkly
enchanting wearing lace and a high collar. And enormous spidery eyelashes. What
was that experience like? What sort of direction were you given in the film, in
terms of posing or projecting a certain image?
Gocast: This film was shot in London, in December. It
was a very cold night and the director knew exactly what he wanted. Since we
shared the same vision, I fit perfectly in the film. This film is going to an
exhibition in Paris
this year. I have worked behind and in front and the camera for a few years
now, and the experience is always the same for me, exciting and always looking
forward to seeing the final creation.
CH: You starred in another
fashion/art film called "Perform
Nijinsky," which was produced by the very talented cabaret performer Mr. Pustra. Clearly the film was something
of an homage to the early 20th Century Ballet Russes legend, Vaslav
Nijinsky. Can you tell DG more about that film project?
Gocast: Pustra is a good
friend and I am also an admirer of his work. Together with Dorota Mulczynska, the
vision of a morphed early 20th Century Ballet Russes was created into a
short film, celebrating and honoring Nijinsky.
Glamorous
icon? London-based model, DJ, and scene-maker Alejandro Gocast is making an
impressive go at that status. I first stumbled across Gocast on Facebook, as
part of the revived New Romantic club scene in London that I’ve long admired and written
about here on Deepglamour. Arising in the early 1980s, the New Romantics represented
a creative, well-dressed, well-coiffed music and style movement, post-punk, post-disco.
Now, some 30 years later, Gocast is one of a new generation of New Romantic
club kids. And he’s spectacular image in photos. I interviewed him exclusively
for Deepglamour.
CH: How do you describe what
you do? I think of you as a model, a glamorous nightclub personality, and a DJ.
But give DG a fuller picture of what you do?
Gocast: I would describe my
career as an eclectic one. As well as being known for what you have mentioned
in the London
scene, I also have a career in luxury events management. My life is not a
simple one.It can be challenging at
times keeping up with schedules, appointments, club nights, friends, family - the
list is endless, but then again life is for the living.
CH: Where are you from?
Your Model Mayhem profile
says you are from Latin America, with parents
of Mexican and German descent, respectively. How old were you when you
moved to Britain?
Gocast: That is one tricky
question. I am actually British, although I was born in Mexico. I have
lived in London
since a very young age. However, my mother language is Spanish, therefore (unfortunately)
I do not have the honor of speaking with an English accent. My “genetic”
background has indeed German from my dad’s side and Mexican from my mother’s. I
hope this all makes sense.
CH: You have such a
distinct look, one that I would describe as exotic and androgynous. Not
what most people might think of as a typical male model. How would you describe
your style image? And how did you discover and develop that image?
(Did you get started in the new New Romantic club scene in London, or was it some
other inspiration?)
Gocast: My image definitely
started in the London
club scene. I used to go out to “normal” clubs and bars, but always feeling
that I was not quite suitable for them, I started to look for a more arty
environment and played around with different looks, which I still do. Since I
have always had a thing for the New Romantic style, I decided to become “re-born”
into a new way, more in sync with my inner personality and my personal opinion
in life, which is a very simple one: be who you are.
CH: What musicians and bands
are atop your current playlist? What musicians and bands are lifelong
favorites?
Gocast: I have a wide range of
taste when it comes down to music, and also quite extreme. I go from hardcore
metal to Kate Bush. My personal music player is full of extremes. I do not
really focus my attention to one artist or band. Since you asked, I a few of my
playlists at the moment are Gargabe, JLo, Amanda Lear, Tribal House, Korn, Dead
or Alive, Donna Summer, Kate Bush, Siouxie and the Banshees… see what I mean?
CH: You've worked with
numerous artists and designers. Perhaps one of my favorite of your
collaborations has been with Marko
Mitanovski, a favorite designer of Lady Gaga. When I first viewed his
fashions, I was truly astonished - they are strange and intriguing and elegant.
Anthropomorphic creatures in black and white. How did you come to
model for Mitanovski?
Gocast: I met Marko at one of
my clubs, “THE FACE.” He was a guest there, and the moment we met we knew we
would be working together. It was the right chemistry and we also get along
really well. It is indeed a pleasure to work with him. I can’t wait for his
next collection! I love his dramatic design style.
CH: Is there a designer
you wear most often right now?
Gocast: I wear a lot of
pieces from various artists, and it is just a question of blending and matching
them to create my night-out style. I recently worked with Dane Goulding,
who designed for the Spice Girls. He has some truly amazing pieces.
CH: You've been in a few
fashion-art short films. I thought "The
Dionysian" released in 2011 was really beautiful and you looked darkly
enchanting wearing lace and a high collar. And enormous spidery eyelashes. What
was that experience like? What sort of direction were you given in the film, in
terms of posing or projecting a certain image?
Gocast: This film was shot in London, in December. It
was a very cold night and the director knew exactly what he wanted. Since we
shared the same vision, I fit perfectly in the film. This film is going to an
exhibition in Paris
this year. I have worked behind and in front and the camera for a few years
now, and the experience is always the same for me, exciting and always looking
forward to seeing the final creation.
CH: You starred in another
fashion/art film called "Perform
Nijinsky," which was produced by the very talented cabaret performer Mr. Pustra. Clearly the film was something
of an homage to the early 20th Century Ballet Russes legend, Vaslav
Nijinsky. Can you tell DG more about that film project?
Gocast: Pustra is a good
friend and I am also an admirer of his work. Together with Dorota Mulczynska, the
vision of a morphed early 20th Century Ballet Russes was created into a
short film, celebrating and honoring Nijinsky.
CH: Do you often do your own
make up for photo shoots and club nights? Or do you more often work with a make
up artist?
Gocast: For photo shoots I do
work closely with Stephanie
Stokkvik, a Norwegian high fashion make up artist. I have learned so much
from her. If you have time, have a look for her on the net - she is amazing! When
I go out, I normally “paint my face” on my own.
CH: Who is your top style
icon?
Gocast: I am afraid I do not
have one.
CH: When you travel around on
everyday errands, to the grocery and laundromat and whatnot, how do you look
and dress?
Gocast: You would not
recognize me, that’s all I call say. I try to go under the radar when out and
about on my personal life in order to give some space to myself and my
close friends and family.
CH: When you aren't
working, what do you do for fun?
Gocast: I am a bit of a geek.
I own a PS3 and a whole bunch of games. I enjoy also watching horror movies
with friends.
CH: What is your dream
vacation destination?
Gocast: My other half loves
traveling, and I have been lucky to have been to and seen some amazing tropical
paradises. My favorite places.
CH: Do you have favorite
perfumes/colognes?
Gocast: Yes, I am currently
about to finish “Un Jardin Sur Le Nil” by Hermes, and my next fragrance will be from Diptyque Paris.
CH: What are your go-to make
up and skin care products?
Gocast: Any good moisturizer
does, really, not any favorites in particular.
CH: What professional goals do
you set for yourself? Are there particular photographers, artists, or
designers you long to work with? Or, do you have something else in mind
quite different from what you are doing now?
Gocast: I am shooting a few
more fashion films this upcoming year and planning on starting some sketches
for my own collection. However, I must keep this under wraps. I am pretty much
open to work with anyone - as long as the chemistry is there, anything is
possible.
CH: What are your New Years
Eve plans?
Gocast: I am spending New Years
Eve with a good friend of mine. She runs a club in Bricklane, from which I will
also be throwing another infamous club night soon. It is a very intimate
space with limited capacity, which is just what I like.
CH: Do you often do your own
make up for photo shoots and club nights? Or do you more often work with a make
up artist?
Gocast: For photo shoots I do
work closely with Stephanie
Stokkvik, a Norwegian high fashion make up artist. I have learned so much
from her. If you have time, have a look for her on the net - she is amazing! When
I go out, I normally “paint my face” on my own.
CH: Who is your top style
icon?
Gocast: I am afraid I do not
have one.
CH: When you travel around on
everyday errands, to the grocery and laundromat and whatnot, how do you look
and dress?
Gocast: You would not
recognize me, that’s all I call say. I try to go under the radar when out and
about on my personal life in order to give some space to myself and my
close friends and family.
CH: When you aren't
working, what do you do for fun?
Gocast: I am a bit of a geek.
I own a PS3 and a whole bunch of games. I enjoy also watching horror movies
with friends.
CH: What is your dream
vacation destination?
Gocast: My other half loves
traveling, and I have been lucky to have been to and seen some amazing tropical
paradises. My favorite places.
CH: Do you have favorite
perfumes/colognes?
Gocast: Yes, I am currently
about to finish “Un Jardin Sur Le Nil” by Hermes, and my next fragrance will be from Diptyque Paris.
CH: What are your go-to make
up and skin care products?
Gocast: Any good moisturizer
does, really, not any favorites in particular.
CH: What professional goals do
you set for yourself? Are there particular photographers, artists, or
designers you long to work with? Or, do you have something else in mind
quite different from what you are doing now?
Gocast: I am shooting a few
more fashion films this upcoming year and planning on starting some sketches
for my own collection. However, I must keep this under wraps. I am pretty much
open to work with anyone - as long as the chemistry is there, anything is
possible.
CH: What are your New Years
Eve plans?
Gocast: I am spending New Years
Eve with a good friend of mine. She runs a club in Bricklane, from which I will
also be throwing another infamous club night soon. It is a very intimate
space with limited capacity, which is just what I like.
New York Times style writer Christine Haughney profiles my friend Joan Kron, who covers plastic surgery for Allure, in this feature and interviews her in the first segment of the video above. (See Joan's DG Q&A here.) "Plastic surgery," says Joan in the video, "is the last subject in style that hasn't really gotten new journalism."
"This is something that women don't share. So very early on I decided I would tell the truth. I would tell the truth about my age. I would tell the truth about surgery—that I had it. And people are so shocked. Then it made me very popular. I can be sitting there quietly at a dinner party and somebody says, 'Joan covers plastic surgery.' And then--bam!—I'm surrounded."
An excerpt from the profile:
“I never lie about my age. I tell everybody about my age because I don’t think women have enough role models,” Ms. Kron said as she leaned back into her living room couch. “Maybe, because I’m getting like these old ladies who just don’t care and tell the truth.”
It’s not just Ms. Kron’s age that makes her stand out along the supple-skinned halls of Condé Nast, where few reporters, editors or executives — except perhaps for 85-year-old Si Newhouse and the 92-year-old New Yorker contributor Roger Angell — appear to have passed the threshold of midlife. Ms. Kron has chronicled how the plastic surgery industry has grown up over the last two decades from a cottage industry to a $10 billion one last year. “The field has exploded,” said Linda Wells, Allure’s editor in chief. “It’s an area that both fascinates and confuses readers.”
Burlesque star Dita von Teese (née Heather Sweet) has
said that she didn’t wait around to become beautiful – she remade herself to
become beautiful. She transforms her
facial features with pale foundation that covers never-to-be-seen freckles, red lipstick, winged eyeliner, and a
tattooed beauty mark. She wears corsets
that artificially constrict her waist. And, as a natural blonde, she dyes her hair an inky black and sculpts it to Veronica Lake perfection. She explicitly embraces artifice, which I
deem a welcome alternative to the prevailing notion of natural-as-beautiful. As we discuss makeovers here on
Deepglamour.net, I think one type of makeover deserving of attention is temporary, extreme
transformation. Often the goal of a
makeover is to become a prettier version of oneself, but sometimes the goal is
akin to achieving an altogether different persona.
For performers like Dita, the transformation is clearly for professional
reasons as much as personal. Lady Gaga,
David Bowie, Boy George, Prince Poppycock, and many other celebrities established a
distinct public persona through exotic makeup, wigs, hats, and clothing. But extreme makeovers aren’t just for professional
performers. In fact, anyone can achieve
a dramatic transformation for the sheer enjoyment of it. And there are many subcultures and hobby
interests that embrace costuming for special events. Less often, people choose an exotic look for
everyday wear.
Consider Aimee Elizabeth, a young lady from the Washington, D.C.
area. Currently, Aimee sells cosmetics
for a living. But on her own time, she
designs and sews elaborate costumes for costume play, or “cosplay,” events. Themes and inspirations include: Gothic
Lolita, Disney, cyber and “perky Goth,” FX make-up, Japanese and ancient
Egyptian culture, mythology, urban legends, and horror films. (For more on cosplay, see this DG Q&A with photographer Ejen Chuang about his book Cosplay in America.) Naturally a green-eyed, fair-skinned brunette,
Aimee Elizabeth created a colorful cosplay persona she calls “Laydee NekoAmi
Chan.” She has executed dozens of
costume looks that include theatrical makeup effects,
colorful horns and grand hair ornaments, doll-like Asian-inspired dresses and
petticoats, and enormous platform boots.
In far-away Sweden,
another creative lady, a wife and mother, has become something of a Facebook
and YouTube sensation. Whatever “Adora
Batbrat” might look like sans make
up, one can only guess. But the
self-described “Martha Stewart of Goth” regularly posts public images of her “make up of
the day,” which involves sharply stenciled brows, elaborately swirled and
dotted eye make up, false eyelashes, face jewels, and freaky contact
lenses. Her light color hair is tinged
in colors that vary from cotton candy pink to lilac to light green, and usually
topped with a crown or headdress. She
also sports tattoos and permanent vampire-like fangs, conjured up by her
dentist.
Adora Batbrat seems to have simply decided to embrace an extreme makeover as a
matter of daily life rather than profession. “I never could
have figured out so many kind people wanted to be part of my life and let me
share theirs but I'm very happy about it, and you are all most welcome,” she tells her Facebook fans. “For those who just think I look cute and
know nothing about me, I'm a Swedish alternative model, a Goth make up guru at
YouTube, loves electro music. I'm a mother of 3 kids.” (She explains her makeover philosophy over on her blog.)
What I admire about people such as Dita von Teese, Aimee Elizabeth, and Adora
Batbrat is their glamorous vision for beauty and self-transformation and their will to achieve it. It’s not for everyone, nor even for most of
the people most of the time. Yet it’s inspiring
to see that anyone who desires to re-imagine themselves can create a delightful, fleeting
illusion.
When I turned in the manuscript of my book (now titled The Power of Glamour, with publication set for next November), I thought I’d get a makeover, for two reasons. The first was practical. I’d been on a sort of hair-dressing strike and hadn’t had a haircut in nine months or seen a colorist in nearly two years. The second was intellectual. The makeover is modern glamour—or glamorous modernity—distilled to its essence: transformation made possible by expertise.
Glamour isn’t a style. It’s something you feel. You’re flipping through a magazine and suddenly feel transported: that dress, that room, that vacation spot, those shoes—something speaks to you, pulls you into the scene, and makes you feel that if only you inhabited that alternative reality, life would be perfect. That’s glamour at work. It makes the ideal seem attainable.
To an audience gazing at before and after pictures or the “reveal” scene in a movie or reality show, the glamour of the makeover taps two longings: to be beautiful, certainly, but also to be truer to your inner ideal. The outward transformation signifies, and enables, movement toward a better life.
But what if you just want to look better? And what if the expert you trust with your public self makes you into someone you don't identify with? Movies and reality shows play that tension for drama and laughs. In the dramatic reveal in Miss Congeniality, the once-slovenly FBI agent Gracie Hart struts out of the aircraft hanger where she’s been worked on by a dozen pink-clad beauty experts. She swings her perfectly styled tresses and attracts admiring male stares with her short, skintight dress. But the new Gracie—who looks remarkably like Sandra Bullock—is as grouchy as she is beautiful. The makeover wasn’t her choice, and she hasn’t embraced her new persona. “I am in a dress,” she growls to her amazed partner. “I have gel in my hair, I haven’t slept all night, I am starved, and I’m armed. Don’t mess with me.”
Thinking about the possible results of a real-life makeover, I knew I wouldn’t wind up looking like a movie star or supermodel. But I worried that I might not look like myself. Makeovers and I didn’t have a happy history. The closest thing I’d come to “before and after” were the beauty treatments I got in the run-up to my 1986 wedding. When my mother treated me to a makeup lesson at a modeling school in my South Carolina hometown, I repaid her generosity by freaking out at the heavy-handed results. The new look seemed to represent everything I wanted to escape by hightailing it out of the South. And when I had my hair styled for my bridal photos, I spent the ride from the hairdresser to the photographer combing out my hair and complaining, “I look like a country music singer!”
This time, I chickened out. I got a basic trim, went back to my old colorist, and waited for my editor’s comments—which, quite unintentionally, reopened the subject. As I revised the manuscript, I decided it needed a short sidebar on “The Makeover.” Along with research that included movies, books, and reality shows, I wanted to interview someone who did them.
The easiest way to do that was to book a makeover with Diane Gardner, a Santa Monica hair-dresser and makeup artist who specializes in makeovers and had rave reviews on Yelp. I could see how she works and, while my color set, ask her questions. (DG ran an edited version of our interview on Tuesday.) And that’s what I did.
Fortunately, Diane is not from the Eddie Senz school of bossy makeovers. After talking with me a little about what I wanted in my hair—longish and blonde with a white streak, but not one quite as large as nature supplies—she proposed putting a bit more color next to my face and blending a highlight and lowlight with the white. Cutting the length so that it hit my shoulder blade would give the hair movement—a clever idea if you don't want to go above the shoulders.
My before and after, by Diane Gardner
My simple skincare routine—Neutrogena Healthy Skin Anti-Wrinkle Anti-Blemish Cleanser
in the morning shower and an Olay facial cloth
(cut in half) at night, plus plenty of sunscreen—met with Diane's approval. A Chanel devotee, she recommended Chanel Vitalumiere foundation in Ivoire/Gentle Ivory, for its light-reflecting properties. Rub it in with your fingers, like a moisturizer, she told me.
These days, hairdressers tend to concentrate either on cutting and styling or on color--and they certainly don't do makeup. But Diane Gardner knew at an early age that she wanted to do it all. "I thought that in order to transform someone you had to do all three services," she says. "Because you have a vision, and then someone else takes it away from you when they do one of the other services."
At 19, she moved from New Jersey to Manhattan to hone her skills. She started with color, training at Louis Licari's La Coupe salon on Madison Avenue. With Licari's grudging permission, she then "moved downstairs" to apprentice with Antonio da Costa Rocha, who, she says, not only taught her how to cut but "how to style in a very glamorous way."
The trick, then, was to learn makeup. Fortunately, Trish McEvoy, then an aesthetician, was a La Coupe client. She offered to teach Diane makeup in exchange for doing her staff's hair. After that beginning, Diane apprenticed with makeup artist Sandra Bocas (now also a fine artist). "Sandra took me into a lot of places I never could have gotten into," she says. "I started doing TV commercials and runway makeup with her, and I loved it."
But, she recalls, "now that I had all three [skills] nobody would hire me, because I wanted to do all three." She started her own salon in New Jersey and later, at the urging of clients who were socialites from La Jolla, moved there, eventually migrating north to Los Angeles. In 2002, she set up her website at MakeoverSpecialist.com--just in time to catch the makeover-TV show craze. She did some work for shows like Movie and a Makeover and Fashion Emergency, but mostly she pulled in new clients who'd Googled "makeover" after watching their favorite shows. At the peak of the craze, she might do 42 makeovers a week.
Nowadays, most of her clients are regulars, but she still gets one or two makeover Googlers a week. During a break in my own makeover (which you can read about later in the week), I interviewed Diane about her experiences.
Virginia Postrel: Where do your makeover customers come from? Are they brides?
Diane Gardner: Weddings are a big part, but not the majority. The majority come from the Internet. I put my website up in 2002, and that was the peak of the makeover TV shows, so everybody started Googling “makeover,” and that’s how people have found me.
VP: So when people come to you for makeovers, what are they picturing?
Diane Gardner: Usually they don’t have a vision in their mind. They don’t know how they could look their best, but they want to trust me to give them what looks best. The number one request is to look natural. Everybody wants to look natural. And youthful.
VP: So why would they come to you for a makeover as opposed to say going to their usual hair stylist, or going to the MAC counter at Bloomingdale’s?
Diane Gardner: They usually come because they want to treat themselves. Sometimes a life-changing event has occurred. Sometimes it’s just that the kids have gone off to college and now it’s time for them, the women. Or it could be a young girl that’s coming out of college and now she wants to look like a young professional. Sometimes men will come for a makeover because they want to meet girls and want to look their best.
VP: How is the sort of makeover you do in real life different from a movie makeover or a reality show makeover?
Diane Gardner: I teach people to sustain the new look that I’ve given them. It could be in the form of regular color services. The makeup regimen is something that they can repeat over and over again and know that it’s going to look the same every time they do it themselves. And they can come back to me for regular haircuts.
VP: In real life, do people usually keep the look?
Diane Gardner: They usually keep it. A lot of times they’ll come back to me and say, “How does my makeup look? Am I doing the right thing? Does my skin look as good as it could? What do you recommend?” Or sometimes they’ll come back and say, “I love what you did. Let’s try something a little different,” usually in the form of a haircut.
VP: How often do you do makeovers?
Diane Gardner: A new client will come to me for a first-time makeover a minimum of once a week, and that’s someone that will find me on the Internet, on Yelp. There was a time when I was in Beverly Hills and the makeover shows were running where I would book 42 makeovers in a week.
VP: What spurred that interest? What were they looking for?
Diane Gardner: I think it’s the glamour. I really do. Because when you were watching those shows—and there are still some of them on television—they go from Plain Jane—of course they start with no hair, no makeup, no hair color—to looking absolutely glamorous.
VP: Right. And they think, “That could be me.” So having this expert treatment is part of the glamour of it.
Diane Gardner: And the enjoyment. I think it’s an indulgence, because a lot of women really don’t take care of themselves, they take care of other people first.
VP: Are there any particularly memorable makeovers that you’ve done that you can talk about?
Diane Gardner: When I moved to L.A. in 2000, I sought out a wedding coordinator I found in the Yellow Pages. She said to me, “I don’t hire new people. You’re from out of town. I don’t know your talent.” And I said, “But you have to give me a shot, you have to give me a chance. I know what I’m doing.” Finally she booked me a bride. She sent me up to Malibu, and she never told me that the bride had had her face burned and had missing eyelashes and part of a missing eyebrow with the burn scar. I walked in the door, and I thought, “Oh, I know what she’s doing.” [laughs] So I did this girl’s hair and makeup, and put on eyelashes and painted in some brows, and did her hair and made her feel absolutely stunning and gorgeous and beautiful, and she was so happy.
VP: So you passed the test.
Diane Gardner: Another of my most memorable moments was in March 2006. I got a call from that same wedding coordinator, and she said, “You have to come to this home in Beverly Hills. Drop what you’re doing, drop your client, you have to come here now. Her Majesty Queen Noor is here for a fundraiser. She’s coming from Larry King’s studio, and I know that you know the difference between television makeup. And she’s greeting 200 guests tonight.” And she goes, “But I don’t know how to tell her that.” So I told my client, “Listen, do you mind if I run?” And my client understood.
I get to this particular residence and I’m briefed by awoman who tells me what the protocol is. She introduces me to the queen, tells me I have to refer to her as “Your Majesty,” and of course you don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. Well, I took one look at her and she had pancake makeup on. And she’s one of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen. But her hair was heavily sprayed, and her makeup was way too heavy to be greeting guests in person. So it was difficult for me to say, but I did it anyway. She came in and she said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I know they hired you, but my hair and makeup is done.” And I said, “Your Majesty, I see that, but it’s television hair and makeup, and so I’d like to—” And she looked at me and at first she was taken back by that. And I said, “It’s just that you’re presenting yourself to the public face-to-face, and television makeup’s completely different.” And then she just turned around and said, “OK, do what you want.” But then she questioned me about every little thing I was doing. As a queen would. So this is my most memorable makeover, because it was done within a one-hour period of time. She looked absolutely stunning afterwards. And when she looked in the mirror she understood.
When Mademoiselle ran the first before-and-after beauty feature in 1936, the magazine enlisted Paramount Studios makeup artist Eddie Senz to transform Barbara Phillips, a nurse who described herself as “homely as a hedgehog,” into something resembling a Hollywood star. He was not tactful. “Your face is too narrow and—er—well your neck’s too long,” he told Phillips. He was even blunter with the anonymous subjects he transformed for the regular column Mademoiselle started after the makeover was a huge hit. “Once a young woman built on these lines would have been described as pleasingly plump,” he wrote in one column. “But let’s be realistic and point out that she’s short, fat, stocky, and missing in attractive feminine curves.”
For all his lack of tact, Senz did know how to change people’s looks. While at Paramount, he so dramatically transformed Frances Farmer that, her biographer Peter Shelley writes, “she did not recognize the person who looked back at her from the mirror.”
Toward the end of World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA) enlisted Senz to suggest how Hitler might disguise himself, by changing or shaving his hair (and mustache, of course), growing a beard, or wearing glasses. Although supposedly unknown until a Der Spiegel report in the 1990s, Senz’s work was actually reported, with concept photos, by The New York Times in October 1944. Senz told Victor Schiff, who wrote the story, that the hardest challenge would be to hide Hitler’s piercing eyes, “the most remarkable I have ever seen.”
Senz’s sense of patriotic duty extended to nearly pro bono hair styling in the 1960s. When LBJ became president, biographerRandall B. Woodswrites, Johnson told a “dumbfounded” Senz, “I’m a poor man and I don’t make much money, but I've got a wife and a couple of daughters, and four or five people that run around with me, and I like the way you make the look....This is your country and I want to see what you want to do about it.” A compliant Senz accepted transportation costs and a $100 bill to style the hair of the three Johnson women and a bunch of secretaries.
Although billed as a Hollywood makeup artist, for most of his career Senz made his living through savvy publicity that drew clients to his New York salon. (Here are his 1940 “beauty tips for office girls.”) He took a simultaneously bossy and skeptical approach to beauty standards.
“Beauty is all a matter of concept,” he toldNew York Times reporter Joan Cook in 1961. “In this country, beauty generally means an oval, Nordic sort of face. We’ve been brainwashed to think our standards are the only standards. Who are we to think we have a priority on beauty knowledge?”
Confronted with a client, however, that relativism disappeared, often along with the client’s eyebrows.“For many of my customers,” he told Cook, “my work consists of mentally superimposing the ideal face on top of theirs and then adding or taking away until the illusion of similarity has been achieved.”
Michelle Breskin (left) and Karol Markowicz are unlikely beauty entrepreneurs. Karol is a writer and former public relations consultant, while Michelle is a real-estate agent with a background in finance. But sometimes consumers know more about what's needed in a market than insiders. (If you want to geek out on that topic, check out my old NYT column on "user innovation.") As busy businesswomen and mothers of young children, the two wanted a high-maintenance look at in low-maintenance time. They took the blowouts-only idea made famous by Drybar and combined it with nail services. At Fix Beauty Bar, which opened in September on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, you can get your hair blown out while you have a manicure, pedicure, or both. You're in and out in less than an hour.
When I had an October speaking engagement in New York, I got the works--blowout, pedicure, and a gel manicure--and saw why the place has been an instant hit with both customers and local media. Karol and Michelle now employ seven stylists and five nail technicians and are still growing and hiring. We asked them about what they've learned from their venture in providing everyday glamour.
DG: Neither of you has a background in the beauty industry. What inspired you to start Fix Beauty Bar?
A: We wanted a place where you could get your hair and nails done at the same time, have it be a nice experience and have the prices be reasonable. We waited for someone else to open that kind of place and when no one did we decided to go for it ourselves.
DG: What are the advantages to offering just styling and manicures/pedicures rather than a full range of hair and nail services?
A: We focus on two things and try to do them perfectly. With a full-range salon someone that is good at coloring might still have to cut hair, for example. Our stylists do a range of blowout styles and our nail technicians do manicures and pedicures. And that's it.
DG: What do you look for in an employee?
A: It's a combination of talent and personality. We've interviewed talented people we knew we couldn't work with--it has to be a combination since we'll be spending a lot of time with the person.
DG: Who's your customer?
A: They've run the gamut of NYC women. We have businesswomen on their lunch break, stay-at-home moms with their kids in tow, twenty-somethings heading out on a Friday night. No one has any time and everyone wants to feel good without it being too much of an expense-both monetarily and time-wise.
DG: How did you have to adapt the usual procedures and equipment for your services so that you could offer them simultaneously?
A: We designed the main square bar at Fix Beauty Bar to comfortably accommodate blowouts and nail services. We hated having our nails done and then moving to another seat to dry so we built-in the hand dryers. We do waterless pedicures (we wrap the feet in hot towels instead) because they're more hygienic and they fit better with our space.
DG: What were the challenges in designing the space?
A: Like everywhere else in NYC space is at a premium. We feel like we used every available square foot wisely with the design of our space.
DG: How did you decide on prices?
A: We wanted to make it moderate enough that people will make us part of their regular routine. We felt that $40 for a blowout, $15 for a manicure, and $35 for a pedicure was the right amount to bring people in for weekly or even twice-a-week appointments.
DG: What have been the biggest surprises?
A: This was the first brick-and-mortar business for both of us (we both have been self-employed in consultant roles before) so we learned a lot of things about having a physical business space. Who knew you have to pay for garbage pick-up!
DG: You've been open only about a few months and have gotten a tremendous amount of local publicity. What's your secret?
A: There's no real secret. We've reached out to a lot of press outlets and they've been responsive because they think we have an interesting idea. It's something women always subconsciously wanted and the light goes off when they hear about it. Of course blowouts and simultaneous manicures make so much sense!
DG: What makes someone or something glamorous?
A: Glamour is about putting yourself together. We all know the days we leave the house not feeling particularly glamorous. But a little lipstick, a nice manicure or a coordinated outfit is sometimes all it takes for everyday glamour.
DG: Who or what is your glamorous icon?
A: For Michelle it's Gwenyth Paltrow. For Karol it's the women she sees in the elevator wearing heels and lipstick at 7am. How do they do it?!
DG: Is glamour a luxury or a necessity?
A: Glamour is a necessity. It goes to the heart of making a woman feel beautiful. That's actually exactly what we were thinking when we started Fix Beauty Bar. Having your hair and nails done might not be the end-all-be-all of glamour but they go a long way to making a woman feel pretty and put together.
DG: Most glamorous place?
A: New York City.
DG: Can glamour survive?
A: Of course! Glamour always survives. No matter the time in human history women always want to be beautiful and glamorous.
DG: Is glamour something you're born with?
A: No, glamour is something you develop. Norma Jean wasn't born glamorous but Marilyn Monroe was the epitome of glamour anyway.
We answered the above questions together and agreed on almost everything. And yet when we did the either/or we had almost nothing in common.
The English essayist Joseph Addison asked it in 1711 after a frustrating night at the opera, when all the pretty ladies seemed to have politics on their mind. Instead of congregating in the front--the better to put on a show for their male admirers--they arrayed themselves according to partisan allegiances: Whigs on the right, Tories on the left, and a dwindling number of "neutrals" in the middle.
The ladies' left-right symbolism (reversing today's left and right just as Americans reverse the European conventions of blue and red) didn't stop with seating charts. It extended to artificial beauty marks, like the ones Hogarth depicted on prostitutes in Marriage à la Mode (above) and A Rake's Progress (right), which were the height of fashion. The patches began as a way to cover the effects of smallpox or syphillis, but eventually became simply a style--with political meaning. Whigs patched on the right, Tories on the left.
Writing in his infuential daily newspaper The Spectator, Addison mocked this partisan patching, noting that the intersection of style and symbolism could create confusion.
whatever may be the Motives of a few fantastical Coquets, who do not Patch for the Publick Good so much as for their own private Advantage, it is certain, that there are several Women of Honour who patch out of Principle, and with an Eye to the Interest of their Country. Nay, I am informed that some of them adhere so stedfastly to their Party, and are so far from sacrificing their Zeal for the Publick to their Passion for any particular Person, that in a late Draught of Marriage-Articles a Lady has stipulated with her Husband, That, whatever his Opinions are, she shall be at liberty to Patch on which Side she pleases.
I must here take notice, that Rosalinda, a famous Whig Partizan, has most unfortunately a very beautiful Mole on the Tory Part of her Forehead; which being very conspicuous, has occasioned many Mistakes, and given an Handle to her Enemies to misrepresent her Face, as tho' it had Revolted from the Whig Interest. But, whatever this natural Patch may seem to intimate, it is well known that her Notions of Government are still the same. This unlucky Mole, however, has mis-led several Coxcombs; and like the hanging out of false Colours, made some of them converse with Rosalinda in what they thought the Spirit of her Party, when on a sudden she has given them an unexpected Fire, that has sunk them all at once. If Rosalinda is unfortunate in her Mole, Nigranilla is as unhappy in a Pimple, which forces her, against her Inclinations, to Patch on the Whig Side.
Like the self-professed vegetarian who turned out for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, some former critics converted to patching once it was turned to partisan use. Wrote Addison, "I am told that many virtuous Matrons, who formerly have been taught to believe that this artificial Spotting of the Face was unlawful, are now reconciled by a Zeal for their Cause, to what they could not be prompted by a Concern for their Beauty."
Style is not glamour, however, nor vice versa. The real glamour in this story is what Addison sought at the theater: an escape from partisanship into a world of beauty.
If you have been reading newspapers or websites, listening to the radio or watching TV over the past few weeks, you have probably heard the news: “You CAN judge a person by his shoes.” Beginning in mid-June, word of a psychology article titled “Shoes as a source of first impressions” began circling the globe.
Describing an experiment by researchers from the University of Kansas and Wellesley College, many reports declared that shoes alone reveal just everything about the wearer’s personality. “Overly aggressive people wear ankle boots,” proclaimed a Los Angeles National Public Radio host.
What psychologist Omri Gillath and his team actually found was more modest. Without the cues of facial expressions and context, college students could guess basic demographic characteristics from looking at photos of other college students’ footwear: gender, age and income. They could also detect the personality trait known as agreeableness, as well as something called attachment anxiety, which is connected to fear of rejection and was correlated with dull-colored shoes. That was all: not political affiliation, not how extroverted the wearers were, not whether they were overly aggressive.
The study made a solid contribution to research on first impressions, but it was hardly earthshaking. By getting so much attention, however, it demonstrated a sociological truth: People love to talk about shoes. Even those who dismissed the research as silly often felt compelled to call radio stations or comment on websites, providing details about their own choices. Why this fascination with footwear?
Like cars, shoes combine function and aesthetics, the promise of mobility and the pleasures of style. As apparel, they offer not only protection but transformation; as autonomous objects, they serve as “bursts of beauty that defy the mundane,” writes Rachelle Bergstein in Women from the Ankle Down: The Story of Shoes and How They Define Us. Unlike cars, shoes are also inexpensive enough to permit people to build diverse wardrobes, changing footwear with season, circumstances and mood.
Whether Jimmy Choos, Pumas or Toms, shoes let us stand out as individuals while fitting into similarly shod social groups. The complex relationship between the social and the personal is why it’s so hard to tell much about a shoe’s owner from a photograph alone -- and why shoes are so interesting. Their meanings require, and sometimes reveal, broader cultural context. Bergstein tells the story of a Texas high school that in 1993 punished students for wearing Doc Martens, falsely assuming that the boots signaled white racism when in fact they merely reflected students’ musical taste. A shoe, says Elizabeth Semmelhack, the senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, “is an accessory that can carry a lot of cultural meaning.”
Many women (including my wife) enthusiastically agree that actor Timothy Olyphant is incredibly hot. As Marshall Raylan Givens in FX channel’s Justified, he is as dangerous as a heart-throb as he is with a gun.
When portraying Marshall Givens in dangerous situations, Olyphant uses his eyes and sly smile to convey the feeling that Givens is coolly sizing up the opposition. Marshall Givens usually seems less prone to rage than the sheriff Olyphant played in Deadwood. Nonetheless, Olyphant makes us feel that Marshall Givens will kill without a moments hesitation, if justified. And since Justified is set in a contemporary rural Kentucky environment filled with dangerous criminals, guns, and drugs, Givens’s expertise with a handgun does frequently come into play.
A number of things seems to make Olyphant particularly attractive to women. He is tall and lean-muscled, with a body like a fashion model. He is boyishly handsome, with a lush head of hair. As Marshall Givens, Olyphant’s intense, dark-eyes sometimes narrow into threatening slits as he looks out from under his cowboy hat. But a sideways glance from those dark eyes, combined with a sly smile, seems to make many of his female fans go weak in the knees.
Olyphant has been talked about as one of the new male actors who have a notable flair with style. GQ magazine recently named his Raylan Givens character as the most stylish man on TV (their site has a great photo of Olyphant in costume). In a December 2011 GQ article Sarah Goldstein wrote that even some men have crushes on Marshall Givens. And Olyphant himself admits that he enjoys playing a badass character like Raylan.
While dining last night at the Bluehour (shown to the left), one of the most fashionable contemporary restaurants in Portland’s Pearl District, my wife Carol commented that part of the expense of dining there was paying to have beautiful servers. Once she mentioned this, I realized that the serving staff was indeed remarkably attractive.
The stylish young hostess who seated us had long, curly blonde hair and wore a little red dress that, while undeniably sexy, was too fashionable to look cheap. The host (floor manager?) was young, tall, handsome, and wore a beautifully tailored black suit.
The other servers were all dressed in white. Carol thought that the young woman who filled our water glasses was more beautiful than Alicja Bachleda, the striking actress in Ondine, a film we had recently seen. This young woman had the tall, thin figure of a runway model, and, like runway models, she and the tall, handsome male servers maintained neutral expressions as they fulfilled their duties.
Their task, I realized, was not to engage with us. Instead, their role was to slip in like attractive, lithe-limbed apparitions and magically do whatever was needed to maintain the glamour of our dining experience. As when, for example, the knife I had used to spread butter was, at the proper moment, whisked away with effortless grace and replaced with a new one.
Our waiter was also dressed in white, and was tall, trim, older, and slightly balding. He seemed to love his work. He had a highly engaging smile, and a manner so relaxed that you immediately felt at ease. This made it easy to ask questions about the more exotic ingredients in various entrées.
The food was remarkably good and inventive, but the impression that I was most left with was now effortless the whole remarkable dining experience had been made to seem. Castiglione’s term sprezzatura came to mind because the staff appeared to handle everything with effortless grace, thus concealing the training and experience that had made this possible.
That maintaining this sense of effortlessness is difficult was made apparent the following evening. While dining in another fine restaurant the floor manager called attention to herself by wearing an ill-fitting suit made out of cheap material. A small mistake compared to the great food, but it led us to wonder if there would be other small mistakes. And once we had switched to that frame of mind, naturally enough, we did notice a few other flaws.
As I was headed to a going-out-of-business sale at the Border’s Bookstore in Santa Fe, I saw something that probably happens millions of times a day around the world. An older sibling was trying hard not to appear connected to a younger. In the photo shown at left, two sisters are distancing themselves from their parents and younger brother behind them. And, sadly, at some point in her teen years, the older sister will protest if told she needs to let her sister tag along.
In Santa Fe I saw a nattily dressed boy of about seventeen purposely walking very fast, forcing his younger sister to periodically have to run or skip to catch up. He was trim, attractive, and had impeccably styled hair. He was wearing a nice sport coat with a well-matched shirt and tie, nice trousers, and well-polished dress shoes. He perhaps looked a bit preppy for the bookstore, but there was no question he looked confident and sharp.
His younger sister was about thirteen or fourteen, and I could see why he was trying to ditch her. She was pudgy, her hair was a mess, and her unattractive pink dress fit horribly. She had put on a long-sleeved t-shirt under the dress for warmth, and this make her outfit look even worse.
While he looked sophisticated, she looked clueless. Once in the bookstore, they separated, and I never saw him go anywhere near her the whole time I was there.
I told this story at a dinner gathering the other night, and many people starting talking about their relationships with their siblings. One woman’s younger brother (by two years) used to like to hang out with her girl friends when they came over, and she was not happy that her friends found him so funny that they liked having him around. Although she had a good relationship with him, she reached her limit when he tried to join them at their lunch table at high school. After all, she laughingly recalled , “I was a senior!”
No matter how close we might usually be to our siblings, there are times when they can interfere with the image we are trying to project, especially in the strange peer-pressure world of junior high and high school.
[Photo "Hey, Alice, I've been thinking: we're old enough to go out on our own now, without Mom and Dad and our younger brother tagging along and slowing us down" by Ed Yourdon. Used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.]
A small battle takes place each day at the dental office where I get my teeth cleaned. One dentist likes rock music, and if he gets there first, the radio is set to a oldies rock station for the day. If the other dentist gets there first, she sets the radio to a country-western station.
Last week, hearing the music, I assumed that she had gotten there first, but it turned out that on that day she had rebelled against the system. The radio had been on the rock station for several days, and deciding she could not take hearing Cher one more day in a row, she had changed the channel.
Because music often serves as a cultural marker, I assume that cosmetics companies think carefully before choosing singers as representatives. CoverGirl has chosen country singer Taylor Swift (seen above) as one of their current faces, and it would be fascinating to know the demographic considerations that were discussed when they were considering her.
Viva Glam has chosen Lady Gaga as a current representative. In this advertising photo for them she looks far less made-up than she usually does in public appearances. Nonetheless, it reveals a different approach to makeup—reflecting the more over-the-top notion of glamour that Lady Gaga favors. She already serves, for example, as do Cher and Madonna, as a favorite singer for drag queens to impersonate.
Carrie Underwood, another country singer, has a contract with Olay cosmetics, and she seems an apt choice to appeal to a demographic of slightly more mature women than would Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga. It must be fascinating to hear the frank pros and cons that are brought up when cosmetic companies are discussing decisions about product representation. Appealing to their target customers is no doubt big business in terms of sales.
As a word glamour is tricky to define. Whether any of us experience something as being glamorous depends on our individual responses. I find Charlize Theron’s hair and makeup wonderfully glamorous in the photo at left, while others may not. I feel certain that the intent was to create a glamorous photograph, but intending something to be perceived as glamorous does not insure we will all respond to it in that way.
In dressing for the Oscars, Theron has made some choices that bombed with most fashion critics. Most people felt that the Christian Dior dress that she wore to the 2010 Oscars looked regrettable on her, and it made many worst-dress lists. The Christian Dior dress (shown at right) that she wore to the 2005 Oscars was panned by some as suitable for a high-school prom, but most loved it, and it has appeared on several lists as one the best Oscar dresses of the decade. When you see a large photograph of her making her entrance onstage in this dress, you can almost imagine that it was chosen knowing what the stage colors and design were going to be. The effect of the dress in relationship to that stage design is stunning.
In a situation when something strikes us as stunningly glamorous, the archaic meaning of glamour as magic or enchantment still seems relevant. What we experience seems to cast a spell on us, and what we perceive seems like an enchantment. Even while under the spell, we may sense that what we are experiencing is in part a transient, artful conjuration, and that everything possible has been done to try to make us feel we are experiencing glamour at its epitome, fully incarnated.
Small wonder this is so difficult to pull off—the slightest incongruity can break the spell of glamour. Oh, but what a delightful experience to have when the enchantment works as planned.
Someday someone may see a picture of you and likely smile or laugh when they realize that you were wearing your hair in the fashion of the age, most likely inspired by your favorite actor or singer. I offer as evidence this picture of my maternal great-grandfather and great-grandmother and their children. All of the women are wearing the 1920s-fashionable Marcel wave. With the string of pearls all of them probably felt as up-to-date as film star Mary Pickford, shown below with the same look (except that Mary smiles and dares to bare her shoulders). My grandfather, the only male offspring, has his hair slicked back in the fashion of Rudolph Valentino.
Looking at high-school and college yearbooks from a few decades gives us the perspective to see just how conformist we sometimes can be. My wife laughs when she sees that most of her friends were wearing the same hair style that she was. Many of the boys in my high school wore some version of Elvis Presley’s or James Dean’s hair, hoping somehow that their charisma would magically transfer to us.
Tina Fey has admitted having a girl crush on Dorothy Hamill (shown here receiving an Olympic skating medal). Fey got a Hamill-style haircut, plus wore a big Dorothy Hamill button. Hamill’s wedge cut flowed so beautifully when she skated that some commentators have lamented the lack of something similar at the last Winter Olympics.
How about DG readers? What actor, singer, or athlete had the glamorous hair that you and many classmates aspired to? For inspiration, here’s a site showing many 20th-century hairstyles, and another showing 10 of the most popular hairstyles.
Perusing Etsy's vintage shops, I came upon this interesting juxtaposition. The tight-waisted, full-skirted '50s vintage dress is just as "alternative" as the model's tattoos, and the tattoos are as overtly feminine as the dress. The contemporary counterpart of the woman who first wore the dress is probably wearing jeggings and several carefully layered knit tops. For more photos (or to buy the dress), click here.
Hair is having a major cultural moment. Disney’s Tangled, a retelling of “Rapunzel” that features what one blogger calls “ninja hair,” is a monster hit, while nine-year-old Willow Smith (daughter of Will and Jada) has become an instant star with her exuberant video “Whip My Hair.”
Meanwhile, in Paris, where they take both fashion and cinema far too seriously to produce celebrations of ninja-hair-whipping, the Cinématèque Française has mounted an exposition devoted to the portrayal of women’s hair in the movies. Titled “Brune-Blonde” (“Brunette-Blonde”), it runs through January 16, with an online version here. The poster features the naturally brunette Penelope Cruz as a platinum blonde, and the exhibit’s intellectual theme is Hollywood’s role in fostering a now-fading “blonde imperialism.”
There is something fascinating, seductive, and slightly unnerving about human hair. It’s a constant reminder of how little control we really exercise over the bodies that define us to other people. Lacking nerves and muscles, hair is simultaneously part of its owner and yet somehow not. A defining part of a person’s appearance, it takes conscious artifice to control. Contrary to the title, Rapunzel's long tresses in Tangled are never in knots. When they start to get in the way, an adorable trio of little girls fashions them into a flower-filled braid worthy of Botticelli.
In the era of the faux-disorderly “messy bun,” the phrase “not a hair out of place” now connotes too much control, Betty Draper-style. But, taken literally, getting your hair under control is still a glamorous ideal. All that’s changed is the definition of “in place.” As a friend once remarked, nobody in a movie love scene ever says, “Owww, you’re on my hair.”
Chances are the moment you saw this photograph you instantly had an opinion about it: whether you felt the model was beautiful, whether her red lipstick looked stunning or overdone. Studies have shown we form initial impressions surprisingly quickly. At Northwestern University researchers found that when they tested listeners by letting them hear tiny samples of music, the listeners were able to classify different styles of music based on samples lasting only 250 milliseconds. A half-second sample added only a little more accuracy, and with a sound sample lasting a second most listeners could classify every style of music they were familiar with. This is an astonishing finding, because it suggests that we use timbre, the character of the sound, to quickly do most of the work when we are identifying musical styles.
This ability to form quick impressions is an extension of our survival skills, stemming from the need to assess sights and sounds that might indicate the presence of danger, or a friend, or an enemy. These quick impressions can of course be mistaken, but without the ability to form quick impressions our ancestors could not have survived.
Those of you who have watched Project Runway or The Fashion Show know that you decide almost as soon as the model walks onto the runway whether you think her outfit is attractive. Later, you sometimes think the judges are crazy to like an outfit that you immediately found unattractive. If we watch an awards show in which music, film, and TV stars are trying to look glamorous, we take one look and quickly decide if we think they have succeeded or failed.
The model in the photograph above is Emily DiDonato, a relatively new model who has been featured in several recent Maybelline ads. The photo at right shows her with little or no makeup. For a chance to form other quick impressions, look at DiDonato made up in strikingly different ways here, here, and here. If we were to imagine each image as our first impression of her, then our initial reaction to her might be quite different.
Understanding this allows us to see why some religions have been suspicious of makeup for centuries. When we see an image of Emily’s face, within milliseconds we have evaluated her appearance and formed an initial impression about her as a person. When her makeup changes she instantly appears to be different—perhaps even a different kind of person. This is horrifying if you believe that people should present only one face to the world. But, if you believe that we play different roles in life, and that we should have the option of presenting ourselves differently, then the ability to dramatically change our appearance in various ways seems liberating and fun.
Sophisticated gardeners typically view garden gnomes as kitsch. However, I do know one sophisticated gardener with a weakness for gnomes who has a few scattered in a large garden on a property of several acres. She jokes that she has heard that each gnome she displays lowers the value of her property by a thousand dollars.
In this light, it is fascinating to read the pages of comments on a Colorado’s 9News story which relates that someone stole almost 150 gnomes from the front landscape of an Arvada, Colorado home. Some readers sympathize with the home owner’s comment that, “You can’t have anything nice anymore.” Others argue that her idea of “nice” must have been amazingly tacky, and that someone did the neighborhood a service by getting rid of what had to have been a kitschy eyesore.
To raise money for breast cancer research, the Colorado Women’s Resource Center has advertised that they will place of flock of 20 plastic pink flamingos on a friend’s lawn for one day for a fee of $30. Knowing that displaying a flock of pink flamingos puts the homeowner’s taste in question, they also offer anti-flocking insurance for $10—just in case you fear that one of your “friends” might impose them on you.
If my DG email inbox is any indication, people are getting increasingly paranoid about how they look in their Facebook photos. Or at least the publicists for various skincare and beauty products hope they are.
One PR query asks, "Is Your Face Facebook Ready?"
Did you know the there are more than 500 million active users on Facebook? Most people block their walls and photo albums, but profile photos are broadcast to anyone who cares to look—from new classmates to prospective employers. Don’t let a bad complexion ruin your image on Facebook… and beyond. Prep your skin for your close up with Vichy Laboratoires skincare solutions. Whether you have acne scars, puffy eyes or oily skin, Vichy will help you put your best face forward.
Another has the subject line, "Look Picture Perfect!"
Unfortunately, every picture you are photographed in isn’t always Facebook “profile” worthy and we’ve all had photos taken that we are not proud of. Luckily, Romy Fazeli of Kymaro Health and Beauty offers quick inexpensive tips to give you a photo-ready look.
Her mixed-bag of recommendations includes a teeth whitener, body shapers, and jewelry. I wonder what they have in common?
A couple of weeks ago, I published a WSJ column citing research showing that while bicycle-helmet laws do save lives they also significantly discourage kids (especially teenagers) from riding bikes in the first place. The comments were lively and interesting—as I note in the article, this is a topic that excites all-or-nothing passions—with some people adamantly arguing that appearance is, or ought to be, completely irrelevant: "Riding a bike is not a fashion statement," declared one.
Wearing Yakkay helmets
Except, of course, that for many people it is. As both the WSJ and NYT have reported, bikes are gaining popularity among fashionable urban women. “The idea now is to look like a pedestrian on wheels,” a bike retailer told the NYT's Ruth La Ferla. Preferably one liked to be featured on The Sartorialist. The "lovely bicycle" is in, and it doesn't go with the typical bike helmet.
Fortunately, in bike-loving Scandinavia enthusiasts for both bicycles and head-protection have turned not to laws but to design. In my article, I briefly mention Yakkay, a Danish startup that offers stylish helmets with changeable covers. "If you make a stylish bicycle helmet you don’t need legislation," says CEO Michael Eide, "and in YAKKAY we wanted to make a helmet people actually want to wear." Now sold in Europe and Canada, Yakkay helmets will be available in the U.S. beginning next spring.
The Hövding: Protection without hat hair (click photo for larger image)
Taking a more radical approach is the Hövding (Chieftain), developed by Swedish designers Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin. An airbag disguised as a collar, it is, as Ariel Schwartz reports on Fast Company.com, "the complete antithesis of the hard-shelled helmets that cyclists have become used to." Six years in development, it will be available next year. Here's a video of how it works:
Husbands often disappoint their wives by failing to notice a new hairdo. But judging from my own experience and that of my neighbors, wives can be just as blind as husbands. I recently grew a full beard that I wore to a fund-raising event, then shaved off before attending a neighborhood potluck. My next-door neighbor noticed as soon as I shaved, but my wife didn’t notice until I pointed it out to her a day and a half later.
She felt guilty about not noticing, especially since this had happened before. I told her that our neighbor mentioned that he had worn a mustache his whole working career, then shaved it as soon as he retired, and his wife didn’t notice. Another neighbor woman also confessed that she had failed to notice when her husband shaved his mustache.
Should you find yourself caught in an embarrassing failure to notice, you might try the line my wife used on me the first time this happened, “I always focus on your eyes.”
Yeah, right. Still—I have to admit her excuse sounded pretty good accompanied as it was by a charming smile.
During recent trips to Santa Fe and Boulder I picked up some fun clothing items, including the 191 Unlimited shirt shown on the model at left. I had some interesting conversations with saleswomen, and more than one of them bemoaned her husband’s lack of interest in ever wearing stylish clothing. Their husbands always wore work clothes or very casual comfort clothes. One saleswoman and I agreed that some men and women seem uninterested in fashion, while others play it safe by wearing what most people around them are wearing. We both felt that developing a personal fashion sense is a slow, incremental process that involves some trial and error.
Any person hates to look foolish, but Carol Dweck’s mindset research at Stanford has shown that people who believe that abilities such as intelligence, musical talent, and athletic skills are unchangeable are the people who are most likely to avoid trying to master areas of endeavor that prove difficult for them. She has shown that children who have been praised because learning some subjects or skills seemed easy for them (“you’re so smart, gifted, or talented”) often absorb a darker side of that message which implies that if you have to work hard to master a particular subject or skill, it means that you have a permanent lack of aptitude in that area. So when some area proves difficult for these fixed mindset students to master quickly, they may feel that having to work hard at it makes them look inept, and they may then choose to avoid that subject as much as possible. In her research Dweck found, for example, that pre-med students with this fixed-ability mindset often changed majors when they encountered the first math or biology course that they had to work hard to pass.
On the other hand, children who have been praised for their hard work in learning various subjects and skills tend to believe that abilities can be developed incrementally, and they are usually far more willing to work hard to try to master subjects and skills that challenge them. They view making mistakes and learning from them as integral parts of the long-term process of growth. Dweck’s controlled studies have repeatedly shown that this incremental-growth mindset is far more likely to give students the grit needed to work hard and make it past various obstacles they encounter as they pursue their interests and goals.
I can understand that some people may have little interest in fashion, and others may not wish to differ in appearance from their peers. But I suspect that for some people, professing a lack of interest in fashion may be a way to avoid giving others any opportunity to judge them as trying and failing to be fashionable. One or two such failures may have already convinced them that they have little aptitude for fashion, and they assume that this will always be the case. And after dressing for years in an inconspicuous, blend-in way, trying something different might make the wearer too self-conscious to appear confident and comfortable.
For those whose mindset assumes that developing an ability is an incremental process, taking a fashion risk becomes a single step toward incrementally developing a personal fashion image. If some people suggest that your efforts on a particular occasion are partially flawed, you can deal with that. You realize that taking risks can lead to imperfect results, and if you decide that this effort didn’t work out as successfully as you had hoped, you assume that this one effort implies little or nothing about your long-term ability to develop an interesting personal sense of fashion. You move forward and try new possibilities.
For the first few years of elementary school one of my granddaughters, who loves animals, wore a tail to school and preferred mismatched socks. I thought this was fun, and I was proud that my daughter, a visual artist, was comfortable letting her daughter go to school dressed in an eccentric way. A gallery owner friend let her daughter choose to head off to the first day of kindergarten in full-length gloves. I don’t know what the fashion sense of either of these young girls will be as adults, but hopefully it will retain some measure of their childhood audacity.
The beautiful bride at the window contemplating her new life is a standard trope in wedding gown ads. But this Italian ad includes an element you won't find in its American counterparts, at least not these days.
Editor's note: Ever since the launch of DG my friend David Bernstein (a Bay Area engineer, not the Volokh Conspiracy blogger) has been passing on interesting glamour-related links and observations. I've finally persuaded him to join us with the occasional post. Here's his debut. For more on this topic, check out this 1974 New York magazine article by Anne Hollander (and for a really creepy experience, keep scrolling to the one after it). [VP]
A couple of Sundays ago the other half was watching Little Women from 1949 on TV while I walked through the living room. Now, I'm an engineer, so fashion generally slides right past me, but the clothes of all the girls (little women?) activated the pattern recognition part of my brain. It seemed that they were all wearing dresses with inverted triangles over the upper torso. They struck me as looking more like photos I've seen of women from the post-World War II era rather than around the Civil War. It got me to thinking about how art that depicts history is affected by the time of the art itself, as opposed to that of the depicted history. It can be difficult to remove the current-colored lenses that we all peer through.
To illustrate the point, here is a montage of scenes from three different versions of Little Women.
When tonight's episode of Covert Affairs airs, most fans of the USA Network spy drama will be looking at sexy leading lady Piper Perabo, who plays rookie CIA operative Annie Walker. I, however, will be wondering what sort of sleeveless outfit her boss Joan Campbell, played by Kari Matchett, will be sporting.
Unless she's on assignment, Annie dresses like a typical Washington professional--in suits (though not in the clip below). Joan, however, never covers her arms. Is this a new form of power dressing? Is it Michelle Obama's influence? Or is it yet another Hollywood fantasy? (They've been putting female detectives in tank tops for years. But at least they also have jackets.) You'd think that Langley's air conditioning alone would dictate more coverage.
Here are a couplemore YouTube clips. Apparently I'm not the only one wondering about these outfits. There's a whole thread on IMDB.
At a recent dinner in the harbor town of Newport, Oregon, the appearance of our youthful waitress sent confusing messages. She appeared to be about 20, had a slender figure, and wore no makeup on her innocent-looking face. She had heightened the aura of innocence by gathering her hair into pony tails on either side of her face, in a style popular with Japanese schoolgirls.
I then noticed that the edge of her left eyebrow was pierced by a delicate gold ring, and that each ear had multiple piercings. When she walked away, I could see that a dark-blue geometric tattoo covered most of her left calf. The piercings and tattoo suggested considerably less innocence than the rest of her appearance. Yet when I was paying the bill she mentioned that a customer had just spilled beer on her, which upset her because she didn’t drink.
Many people work part time as servers while going to school or pursuing careers where income is unpredictable. I would have loved to ask our waitress some questions about herself, but I was there with some of my wife’s relatives, and somehow it didn’t seem appropriate. On occasions when I have asked, I have discovered that I was being served by pre-med students, actors, artists, published novelists whose sales were modest, graduate students, and a variety of other aspiring individuals. For them, working in a restaurant was seldom the role that they most identified with, and from their appearance you would often have had a hard time guessing their larger aspirations.
I found this waitress intriguing. Was her innocent look a guise imposed upon her by this family-friendly restaurant? When she was not working as a waitress, did she wear makeup, and did it go with the tattoos and piercings? Was her abstinence from alcohol part of a healthy diet lifestyle that helped her stay slim? Did she have unsuspected aspirations? Was her “normal” appearance so different that I would scarcely recognize her? Did she turn into some glamorous creature of the night when she went on dates? Or was she simply an innocent young woman whose piercings and tattoo were nothing more than her idea of fashion?
["A Smile with Every Meal" is from Andrew Stawarz's Flickr photostream, and is used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.]
Fashion stylist Angie at the excellent YouLookFab.com blog recently challenged readers to tell her how much they'd have to be paid to wear this outfit in normal, everyday life. Among the first 70 replies prices ranged from $100 to a cure for cancer ("no amount of money would be enough"). Amazingly, a real online retailer charges £135 for the hot mess.
The outfit is hideous and inappropriate to pretty much every context. It also sends a strange signal about the wearer's identity (Hooker working Comic-Con? Unfortunately paired Project Runway model?).
But what about outfits that aren't downright ugly, just unconventional or signals of the wrong identity? How sensitive are you to social expectations? To making sure your wardrobe matches your self-image? How do you balance those two factors when identity and taste clash with convention? When I interviewed cosplayers at Anime Expo, several told me they wished they wear Edwardian-inspired fantasy outfits every day. On a more mundane note, I myself spend most days in jeans and T-shirts even though in theory I'd rather wear suits or dresses. It just seems strange to dress up to work at home.
So, to add to Angie's question, here are some less outre outfits to consider.
These pink and orange Lily Pulitzer silk pants sell for $98. I'm sure they have many fans, but they're definitely for people with very specific tastes. And they say the wearer is either a super-preppy or a wannabe. Along similar lines, consider madras pants, available for both men and women.
What would someone have to pay you to wear them to work? Or would you happily pay for the privilege yourself?
Moving on to a different taste subculture, how about this Renaissance Faire-influenced upcycled T-shirt dress? I love the color palette, and the "medieval style liripipe hood" and giant bell sleeves have a certain romance. But for everyday office wear? How much?
Finally, no such discussion would be complete without the classic Juicy Couture velour tracksuit, complete with rhinestone-encrusted crown. Everyday glamour? Or the wrong sort of signal? What's your price?
Got an outrageous outfit to share? Please add your own challenges, with links, in the comments below. We'll award a DeepGlamour goody bag to the one we like the best.
The capacity of human beauty to move us has long been a source of mystery. In Christopher Marlowe’s 1587 play, Tamburlaine the Great, Tamburlaine’s rage for conquest causes him to destroy cities, kingdoms, and whole races. He kidnaps Zenocrate, the daughter of the Egyptian king, rapes or seduces her, then falls in love and marries her. They have three sons together, and when she dies he is inconsolable.
At one point, unable to understand why her beauty moves him so, Tamburlaine decides that if all the poets in the world, with all their wit, were to fashion the perfect tribute to beauty, then
“Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest.”
I chose this photograph of Monica Bellucci to illustrate our inability to fully express our sense of wonderment when we perceive beauty because it conceals her astonishingly sexy figure. The beauty of her face and figure are so impossible to ignore that many of her film roles have focused on the obsessive desire that her appearance fosters in men. In 2004 AskMen.com voted her the most beautiful woman in world.
This black-and-white portrait of Bellucci in her mid-40s allows us to see that part of her allure is her remarkable poise. She started modeling when she was sixteen, and for awhile she used her earnings to pay for law school before she eventually choose to pursue modeling and acting full time. She speaks Italian, French, English, and Spanish, and as an actress she has had speaking roles in each language. I suspect that her intelligence has helped her keep all the fuss about her appearance in perspective.
Looking at Bellucci’s dark Italian eyes, I also suspect that it would be impossible to ever fully “know” this woman. But I think the same is often true of the people that each of us loves and are closest to. We may get used to the patterns of living with someone after a number of years, but “getting used to” someone doesn’t mean that we fully “know them.” And I suspect that thinking we do can easily become an unfortunate mistake. There is something important to be said for retaining some sense of mystery, and periodically surprising your significant other with an unexpected action designed to please them can suggest that you never intend to take your relationship with them for granted.
As someone who enjoys surprising my wife with unexpected gifts, I once mentioned to a colleague that I thought I would pick up a dozen roses on the way home. He asked what the occasion was, and I said that there was no occasion, and that’s what would make it a nice surprise. He said that he had never done anything like that, and maybe he should buy roses too. Then after a moment’s thought, he said, “No, if I did that my wife would start the third degree on me, wanting to know what I had done wrong, and she would never let up.”
[The photo of Monica Bellucci is by Studio Harcourt Paris, and is used under the WikiMedia Commons license. The “A Wonderful Surprise” photograph is by Flickr user audreyjm529, and is used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.]
Randall's post about the aging motorcyclists raises an interesting question: What's the difference between being glamorous and feeling glamorous?
Since at least the 1930s, fashion magazines, cosmetics companies, and fashion houses have treated "glamour" as a style or product. "The gospel of Max Factor and [British makeup artists] the Westmores was that glamour could be achieved by any woman who put her mind to it," writes Carol Dyhouse in Glamour: Women, History, Feminism, citing a magazine's 1939 on the makeover of a charlady. (She wiped off her new face and went back to her regular life.) A makeover or special outfit may make someone look attractive, and looking attractive may make her feel glamorous, but is that all there is to actually being glamorous?
In her excellent new book American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture, architectural historian Alice T. Friedman examines mid-century buildings that were designed to make their occupants feel glamorous by framing their lives--literally, with windows and other structural outlines--and giving them a feeling of processing through a special space. Eero Sarinen's TWA terminal, she writes, "offered travelers a vivid architectural experience, one in which ordinary people were given the opportunity not simply to arrive and depart in style but also to process and promenade, to sit, stand, dine, and observe one another in spaces of a ceremonial quality previously reserved for only the privileged few." The terminal was glamorous, but judging from the ordinary-looking crowd in the accompanying photo, I can't say the same about the passengers. Slumping in their swoopy modern seats, they look tired and a little schlubby, hardly up to crisp Mad Men standards. (You can see the photo at the end of this online excerpt from the book.) They don't make me yearn to join their special world.
Real glamour requires a receptive audience. You can only be glamorous if others perceive you that way. Feeling glamorous, on the other hand, means that your mental picture of yourself is one that you would find glamorous. You become the audience for your own glamour, creating a image of yourself that veils your flaws. Defying the ultimate intimacy, you somehow manage to turn yourself into an alluring Other. As for actual others, they may see something different.
While strolling past the Santa Fe, NM plaza, the amplified music of the folk singer entertainer was temporarily drowned out by a group of motorcyclists riding by. Their loud bikes shouted “look at me,” but I had already guessed what I would see. This would not be a youthful motorcycle gang led by a Marlon BrandoThe Wild One look-alike, but aging fathers and grandfathers reliving the feelings of their youth. The do-rag of the gentleman who stopped closest to me held back not the luxuriant hair of youth, but the thinning gray hair of upper middle age. His minimally muffled Harley-Davidson might have sounded slightly menacing, but the rider looked benign. His portly figure spoke of too many beers and too much sitting, and for the sake of his body he would have been better off walking, hiking, or bicycling.
But this ride was not about how he appears to the outside world, but how he feels inside. Like many summer riders, during most weeks of the year his life revolves around the typical responsibilities that tie a man down: a wife, a family, a house, and a regular job or profession (assuming he’s not retired). But for the moment he is riding free: he has escaped all of that and feels unencumbered by conventional obligations.
Granted he may have to bring along a Lipitor prescription for his high cholesterol, and perhaps other medications for high blood pressure or other ailments, but these are far from his thoughts. And tonight he may have to phone home to let his wife know he is safe and well, assuming that she is not driving a support vehicle for the group and will meet him later at some prearranged motel. But none of that matters now. At this moment in time he has escaped the restraints of everyday existence, and with “Born to be Wild” as his mental soundtrack, he can imagine himself a youthful free spirit riding toward the unknown adventures of his future existence.
Writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, William Loeffler proclaims the end of the Metrosexual:
The man's man is back. And he's had enough of unisex salons, simpering emo music and the emasculating kryptonite of the Oprahsphere.
Or so say a spate of ads, books and websites that hail the emergence of the retrosexual, whose attitude and style hearken back to the strong, silent type of the '50s and early '60s.
The retrosexual keeps things simple. He does not own more hair and skin care products than his wife or girlfriend. He does not "accessorize."
Think Don Draper, the dapper, jut-jawed executive played by Jon Hamm in the AMC series "Mad Men." He may be a philanderer, but you won't find a pink shirt in his wardrobe. Like the dark hero characters of ex-spy Michael Westen in "Burn Notice" and U.S. Marshal Raylon Givens in "Justified," "Mad Men" presents alpha males who live unapologetically by their own code.
Loeffler's is the latest in a string of articles on the so-called Menaissance (see for instance this 2006 Boston Globe piece). What struck me, however, was the juxtaposition of Don Draper and Michael Westen (I've never seen Justified)--both exceedingly stylish figures. They may not own a lot of grooming products, but they do accessorize. Westen's sunglasses are, in fact, one of the show's signature props and have sparked much online discussion from viewers who want their own versions. (That'll be $400.)
The real contrast isn't between these guys and overgroomed Metrosexuals but between both groups, with their grown-up polish, and the beer-bellied American male in comfy shorts and untucked oversized shirt. On my recent trip to research glamour in Shanghai (more on that later), I talked with author and marketing consultant Paul French who, among many other interesting things, commented on why, with a few exceptions, American apparel lines haven't been terribly successful in Shanghai. U.S. companies are too attuned to the sloppy casualness of the American market, and Shanghainese like to look sharp. They want Banana Republic, he said, not The Gap--something that apparently escapes the parent company of both. (Instead of BR, there's a local knockoff called Urban Renewal.)
By way of illustration, French recounted what observed when two jet-lagged Americans came into the McDonald's where he and his 10-year-old son were having breakfast:
I noticed the Chinese were giggling at them. And then I looked at them. These guys were about my age. They’re in their 40s, right? And they had T-shirts, baseball caps, shorts, and then sort of sports shoes that looked like they had some tractor tires on the bottom of them. And I looked at them and then I looked my 10 year old who was not quite as casual as them.....If you put them on a bus and drove them around town, people would think they were retarded and going to the special place that they’re looked after for the day. I mean just isn’t it a shame? They never grew up mentality but they did physically.
No one would say that about either Michael Westen or Brad Pitt. What makes Retrosexuals seem manlier than Metrosexuals is their sprezzatura. They hide the artifice it takes to achieve their look. But the popularity of both models suggests that at least some American men want to escape the pressure to be sloppy.
Needing a new pair of glasses, I drove an hour to visit an eye wear store in Denver. I was told they had 4,000 “products” to choose from, with designs from all over the world. To help me narrow down the possibilities, I was meeting with Paige, the salesperson who had helped me choose my last pair of glasses. While working in a local shop, Paige had put me in a pair of glasses I would never have tried without her help. I knew she had done well because many people, including strangers, had subsequently commented on how much they liked my glasses.
I called a few hours early to let her know I was coming, and when I arrived she said she had been thinking about what eye wear she would like me to try ever since I had called. I sat in a chair while she walked around the store putting glasses on a tray, and she came back with about ten pairs to try. As soon as I tried some she would say “no,” and before long we were down to two choices that she felt looked great. Finding it hard to choose, we called another salesperson over, and that woman voted for the pair that she felt had more “edge.” So the choice became the Danish-designed Orgreen pair shown in the photograph.
I’ve described this satisfying shopping experience to illustrate why we go back repeatedly to work with good salespeople. Sadly, finding a salesperson with a good eye whose opinion you trust can be difficult. So when you locate such a salesperson, they become a valuable asset. In this case, when Paige changed where she worked, I followed her to her new location. Paige has helped several people I know choose their eye wear. Some friends told my wife and me about her, and I send people to her whenever they comment on my glasses or my wife’s.
All too often you find yourself dealing with salespeople who don’t seem to hear what you’re telling them—they seem to ignore or not understand what you’ve said about the look you are hoping to find, the situation you need it for it, and so on. Sometimes they don’t even know the store’s merchandise well enough to help you narrow down your choices, whereas a good salesperson whose opinion you trust can save you a lot of time, and save you grief in other ways.
Last fall my wife was headed to an event in London. After she had the rest of her outfit picked out, she went to a shoe store that had a bewildering array of choices. She knew the look she wanted, so she picked out seven pairs of shoes to try on. With both arms full of samples, she showed a young salesperson her choices. My wife explained that the event would be in a huge exhibition center, and that she might be walking and standing for most of a day. To my wife’s surprise the young woman started taking shoes away from her, explaining that she was taking away any shoes that she felt would be uncomfortable after a few hours. My wife was left with only two choices, one of which was the pair of Dansko Sally suede clogs pictured at right.
Though my wife loved them, she doubted they would remain comfortable for a full day. The salesperson assured her they would, and thankfully it turned out she was right.
A friend of ours was going to the same event and purchased a pair of shoes without asking about comfort. He decided to test his purchase by spending an hour on his feet in them, after which he pronounced them “posing” shoes, not “wearing” shoes. He had to go shopping again to buy shoes he could wear all day.
Finding a salesperson who will tell you when something you are trying on doesn’t work well on you is a good start. Finding one who tells you that something “looks great on you” when it fits terribly is a signal to shop elsewhere. We once had artist residencies at Montalvo in California, with second-story rooms. The villa grounds were often used for elaborate weddings. I got to know the wedding planner, and looking down on one of those wedding ceremonies I commented to her that the strangely layered dress that the mother-of-the-bride was wearing looked as if her slip were showing. The wedding planner’s comment was, “Someone lied to her.”
Notice anything missing from the lamps on this page of a recent Crate & Barrel catalog? Of course you do. You read the headline. With one exception (top left), the lights glow without benefit of electric power. They have no cords.
Whether through careful styling or the handy use of Photoshop, the catalog’s designers have removed the unsightly evidence that these wares require external support. Or maybe the photographers just clipped off the cords.
There’s high-brow precedent for such editing. Paola Antonelli, the Museum of Modern Art’s delightful design curator, tells me that when she arrived at the museum she discovered that all the cords had been removed from the collection’s lamps. Some unknown museum employee had apparently thought trailing cords spoiled the designs—authenticity be damned. Paola had the lamps rewired. After all, modernity includes electricity. Like the Crate & Barrel catalog, however, thephotosonthe MOMAsite, stillomitcords. (Thereareexceptions, but they’re rare and recent.)
Erasing a lamp's cord makes the photo not only neater but more alluring. The viewer isn't distracted by thoughts of where the cord would need to go in the room or by fears of tripping on it. And such wireless autonomy is itself glamorous, suggesting a beauty and function independent of the unromantic infrastructure of power plants and the annoying expense of electric bills. Like the glamorous protagonists of escapist Golden Age movies, who had plenty of money but never seemed to work, lamps without cords need no outside support.
Randall's post below, “If Someone Glamorous Walked By, Would You Notice?” is about the things you miss when you’re on your cell phone. But the title made me wonder what the person walking by might look like.
When I searched Google images for “glamorous woman” and “walking,” I discovered a different connection between cell phones and glamour. The top three results were this stock photo, in which the woman is wearing sunglasses, the most classic glamorous accessory, while talking on a cell phone. (She’s also pushing a baby carriage, which may or may not be glamorous.)
Sunglasses, cigarettes, veils, hats, and fans are all classically glamorous accessories. All simultaneously attract attention and create distance. The audience gets an intriguing glimpse of the glamorous person, not a full view.
On a cell phone, the person is similarly present and distant, engaged with someone the viewer can neither see nor hear. The phone adds an aural dimension to the visual mystery of sunglasses. At the same time, like wearing jewelry or expensive clothes, talking on the phone signals status: Here is a person who is socially connected, who has friends, who is busy or important.
With cigarettes, veils, hats, and fans all more or less out of fashion, has the cell phone joined sunglasses as a glamorous essential?
If you were on your cell phone, probably not. In Psychology Today Ira Hyman, Jr. reported that 75% of people
walking on a path while talking on their cell phone didn’t notice
someone in a clown suit ride near them on a unicycle. You might even have missed this image of Darth Vader interacting with Japanese school girls. Hyman discusses how using a cell phone absorbs our attention, just as it did for the two commercial airline pilots that flew past their airport.
Surprised to learn that while on a cell phone he had walked past one of his good friends without seeing him, Jim Nelson, editor-in-chief at GQ, wrote an editorial on what he calls “inattentional blindness.” Mentioning Hyman’s findings, Nelson writes that, “Cell phone conversations demand a different neurological engagement,
causing us to create mental imagery that drowns out “the processing of
real images.”
Perceiving glamour requires that we process images, because glamour is partly an act of projection. Only after some image has successfully captured our attention is it possible for us to project onto that image the aura of glamour. This can happen instantly if the image sparks our desire to be like someone, to own an article of clothing, to drive that car, and so on. We sometimes imagine our life being transformed if only this fantasy were true. Images that we find glamorous have generally been calculated
to trigger such projections by showing their subjects to best advantage, without revealing messy aspects like cost, effort, and flaws.
I use a cell phone and an iPod Touch, and I find both to be great tools. But like Nelson I find it sobering to realize that the mental processes involved in using my techno gadgets may sometimes drown out my mental processing of images in the world around me.
[“Of Schoolgirls and Vader” by Flickr user karanj. Used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.]
My wife and I moved from the Phoenix area to Fort Collins, Colorado about four years ago. A recent Gallup Poll study reported that Fort Collins and the neighboring city of Loveland have the lowest level of obesity in the country (16%). Boulder, Colorado was number two at 16.6%. The study reported that most people in these cities practiced good health habits.
Any American city of 100,000 or more will have some people who are obese and some who are underweight. But I find living in a city where obesity is relatively uncommon to be quite a different experience. During a recent trip to Phoenix and Tucson, I saw more obese people in four days than I would likely see
in six months in Fort Collins. (And Arizona cities are not among the most obese.) In a large book store in Tucson, almost
half the employees struck me as obese or nearly so. In contrast, I couldn’t ever remember seeing obese employees in retail stores in Fort
Collins. At a restaurant in Tucson I was stunned by the obesity of the patrons at one table. Compared to what I have become used to seeing, some of them seemed
grotesque. Yet there were diners at other tables who were just as
obese. I have never seen a similar situation in a Fort Collins
restaurant.
A recent study found that high school girls judge
their weight relative to their peer group, and I think adults do the same. We assume that the people around us provide a more realistic perspective on normal weight than do tall, thin models in magazines. So if you are overweight and hang out with other overweight people, you may feel that your weight is reasonably normal. But in a city where most people are relatively fit, this feeling is hard to sustain. If you are seriously overweight and shop in downtown Fort Collins or Boulder, you will look fat compared to most people around you.
This creates pressure to stay fit. Among our close friends, everyone does something to exercise, as well as putting some some effort into maintaining a healthy diet. Several of our friends work with personal trainers or take classes in Yoga, Pilates, or Tai Chi. All of them engage in some outdoor activities, from gardening and walking to running, bicycling, and cross-country skiing.
Does everyone in these cities work hard at fitness? Of course not. But a high percentage of them do regularly engage in physical activity. Knowing this makes it harder to make excuses for not exercising, especially when some your neighbors are amazingly fit. In my case a woman two houses down has climbed all 54 of Colorado's 14,000+ mountains. And a woman in her late sixties at the end of the block still runs marathons at 5000' elevations.
[Photo of two women on a Sunday ride in Boulder County by Let Ideas Compete. The photo of the group backpacking the Estes Park back country west of Loveland is by akeg. Both photos used under the Flickr Creative Common's license.]
Virginia’s recent post contrasting the differences between “cute” and “glamorous” made several interesting comparisons. Her distinction between “innocent, ingenue” and “worldly, sophisticated” reminded me of a lyrical poem by Richard Wilbur
in which an experience of innocent beauty created an ecstatic moment for him. His poem, Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning, begins:
I can't forget
How she stood at the top of that long marble stair
Amazed, and then with a sleepy pirouette
Went dancing slowly down to the fountain-quieted square;
Nothing upon her face
But some impersonal loneliness,—not then a girl
But as it were a reverie of the place,
A called-for falling glide and whirl;
The poet witnesses a girl who, amazed by the Spanish steps in Rome, comes gliding and whirling down them, seemingly innocently unaware that she somehow completes the image of the place for the poet. Wilbur continues:
As when a leaf, petal, or thin chip
Is drawn to the falls of a pool and, circling a moment above it,
Rides on over the lip—
Perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it.
To create the lovely photograph shown at the beginning of this post, the photographer Matilde dressed herself in the kind of fairy skirt that so many young girls have played in, and she danced in her bare feet. The photograph has a wonderful feeling of innocence, but it is a portrayal of innocence created by a grown woman.
If we imagine a glamorous Italian woman descending those same stairs wearing a high-fashion gown such as the one shown here by Valentino, we assume that while she was descending she would remain perfectly aware that she was presenting herself as a beautiful, sophisticated woman.
And her awareness of her image, and the value that she knows that Western culture places on such fashionable glamour, is part of what makes her appear “dangerous,” to use Virginia’s term. She seems fully aware of the worth of her beauty and perfectly willing to use the status offered by her appearance and wealth to her full advantage.
The photograph of this gown (found on a Chinese economic site) is an illusion in that it was taken during a runway show, and the model may be wearing a gown that she herself could not afford to own. So this photograph is a portrayal of glamour designed to convince women who can afford Valentino’s
gowns to purchase them. Nonetheless, I imagine this model feels glamorous while wearing this gown and walking the runway.
To see this model wear this gown and descend the Spanish steps would provide an impression as unforgettable as a girl innocently dancing down them. But where the girl presented an image of innocence, the model would present an image of glamorous worldliness.
[The photograph “As A Fairy” is copyrighted by Flickr user ♥ { ๓คtเl๔є, and is used by permission.]
There's a new Barbie on the scene, and the rest of the dolls on the shelf aren't quite sure what to make of her. She's got long blond hair and bright blue eyes, just as she always has, and a smooth, tanned, curvaceous body. And just like most Barbies you've known over the years, she loves any color as long as it's pink. But there's something different about this new doll. When you meet her, you might notice there's a special little necklace hanging just over her sternum, or as she turns to leave, that there's a flat panel screen between her scapulae. Meet Video Girl Barbie, presented to the world this week at the International Toy Fair, a kind of Flip camera with a face that Mattel promises will let you look into the world of Barbie.
There's something interesting about this notion of looking into Barbie, or looking through her. Barbie has always been a lens into a different world for girls, a glamorous teenaged or adult world full of fashion, parties, careers, and dream houses. This was, after all, the intention behind the doll as it was invented by Ruth Handler — to give girls a way to act out their fantasies and fears through imaginative play. This premise of projection was also the reason for the most controversial feature of Barbie's physicality — her breasts — because Handler felt a mature physique was essential to allowing girls to envision their future selves. The Barbie business model, with its endless parade of kits containing outfits and accessories, serves as stimulus for these projective fantasies, providing ample conduits to aspirational worlds.
It seems to me that girls have never had trouble looking into Barbie's world. Because the nature of Barbie is such that at any point in time, Barbie's world is at least partially (often mostly) in a girl's head, that world is personal and accessible. Barbie is a sketch, just defined enough to inspire a story. She's an outline to be inhabited, a room to decorate with your own desires. The doll and her things provide the form and the context; you provide motivation and narrative. Talking to friends who played with Barbies as children, the imagined scenes vary wildly, even with the same props. Some girls staged fashion shows in the Dream House while others were hosting dinner parties. Some were getting dolled up for the prom while others were making out with Ken behind the bleachers. Barbie's stories are as varied as our own because her stories are our stories. Maybe not the ones we lived, but the slightly more glamorous or dangerous ones we once wished to live. Girls see through Barbie into these fantasy worlds, and they do it effortlessly.
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To think that such a view could enhance the fantasy of Barbie is to assume that Barbie's world is the molded plastic one Mattel produces in its factories, and not the ethereal one in the female consciousness. The most interesting things a girl sees in Barbie are not things she sees with her eyes, but with her mind.
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Making the leap to Video Girl Barbie, a doll you look through, seems logical but oddly literal, an Amelia Bedelia kind of goof. What can you see in looking through Barbie like a periscope that you can't see with your own eyes? To think that such a view could enhance the fantasy of Barbie is to assume that Barbie's world is the molded plastic one Mattel produces in its factories, and not the ethereal one in the female consciousness. The most interesting things a girl sees in Barbie are not things she sees with her eyes, but with her mind.
Given that, this seems less a doll than a tech toy, and I imagine it will have big appeal to girls on this level. A video camera is a video camera, and it's fun regardless of the housing, though girls today are probably savvy enough that they don't need technology to be softened up with fashion in a bionic Barbie.
But the bionic nature of this doll — a strange mashup of hard tech and feminine physicality — does raise a different set of interesting questions. As we move closer to an era of post-human body modification, what kinds of new body types will emerge as aspirational? If in the past five decades Barbie has represented a standard of beauty that can be blamed with a rise in body modifications ranging from breast implants to blond highlights to anorexia to tanning, how will she evolve as a standard in a world where the available modifications are increasingly technological? Will Barbie offer a new viewpoint on the form and function of the female body as the lines between man and machine are increasingly blurred?
If these sound like imaginary inquiries better left to the world of futuristic sci-fi films, think again. Already, the field of wearable technologies is electrifying fashion, exploring ways our clothes can behave or react like smarter, more beautiful skins. Designer Hussein Chalayan is known for his avant garde work with wearables, exploring how robotic elements can create extraordinary displays of movement and light. Joanna Berzowska of XS Labs is another designer working in this space, fusing fiber and wire to create striking interactive garment-sculptures. Often these designs suggest new functions our bodies might take on in the future, like increased sensory capabilities or protective response mechanisms. The subtle displays of Ying Gao's Walking City dresses, for example, function like hypersensitive second skins, unfurling and rustling in reaction to the proximity of others. Powering many of these innovative designs is the LilyPad Arduino, a washable microcontroller that can be fully integrated into clothing, developed by Leah Buechley at MIT's Media Lab.
These are technologies worn on the body, without requiring any intrusion or permanent modification. But those innovations are coming too. Discussions of augmented-reality contact lenses are in the offing, and just this week, the New York Times reported on the development of piezoelectric body implants that would allow us to convert our bodily movements into energy that can be used to power our electronics. Already we see people who seem chained to their iPods or mobile devices — imagine if one day we actually plugged them into our skin to recharge them. Or stopped by the Apple Genius Bar for a surgical battery change?
If these potential innovations sound eerie, think about how breast implants sounded the first time you heard of them. Body modification is always unsettling, sometimes even long after it has become widespread. But all of these designs, whether worn on the body or inserted within it, are pioneering new possibilities in the shape and performance of the human physique. As we gain more power to control how our bodies look and what they do, which of these designed bodies will move towards the mainstream? Which will become new aspirational models? Will techno-bodies ever be sexy?
I don't propose that Video Girl Barbie is in any way an attempt on the part of Mattel to forge a new post-human female ideal. (The violence of the mashup — Barbie's viscera removed and replaced with a TV — would make that a vision more appropriate for R-rated horror films than Toys 'R Us.) But the juxtaposition has made me wonder what the Barbie of 2029 looks like. Will Barbie at 70 be a stunning cyborg? If we saw her today, would we think she's beautiful? Or, in an ironic twist, will Barbie's plastic figure seem nostalgically natural in comparison with our own bodies of the future?
I became aware of Doppelgänger Week on Facebook because my wife and I were mystified by the childhood photograph of my daughter that appeared by her name on her Facebook posts. Not recognizing it, my wife e-mailed her to ask where the photograph came from. Our daughter found this hilarious, and called to say that it was a photograph of Shirley Temple, and that she was participating in Doppelgänger Week. To the right is the photograph of Shirley Temple she used. Below is a photo of our daughter at 3½ years old.
This campaign was started by Bob Patel with this message, "It's Doppelgänger week on Facebook; change your profile picture to someone famous (actor, musician, athlete, etc.) you have been told you look like. After you update your profile with your twin or switched at birth photo then cut/paste this to your status.” I have since noticed that several Facebook friends have substituted celebrity photos.
Psychologists could have a field day conjecturing on how and why we would openly acknowledge that we have been told we look like someone else. Surely we would not do so unless we found the association somehow positive or at least amusing. Who would choose to post a photo that acknowledges that we’ve been told we resemble someone that we ourselves find unattractive or irritating?
We are strange creatures relative to names and faces. We are predisposed to like someone who resembles a person we already know and like. And when we see a celebrity that resembles someone we dislike, we are ready to regard them with suspicion. The same thing sometimes happens with names. Of course, these initial inclinations often turn out to be ill-founded, but they seem strangely easy to form.
Perhaps the oddest thing about Doppelgänger Week was that as I saw new postings or friend requests, I was not always sure that I was looking at a photo of that person. Was there a chance I would form false impressions based on my feelings about the Doppelgänger?
Bethania Baray, one of my singer/actress Facebook friends, put up a photograph of Penelope Cruz as her doppelgänger. I can see some resemblance, but my larger impression is that both are uniquely and remarkably beautiful.
Making judgments about personality based on photographs is risky (especially with actors), but we all do it. In her photographs Bethania almost always looks like she would be “fun to be around.” Do we have the same impression of Cruz? And how much are our impressions of Cruz are colored by characters we have seen her portray in films?
[Facebook photo of Bethania Baray used with her permission.]
The awards season provides various fashion spectacles, and the Grammys are usually the most outrageously flamboyant. This is especially true now that music videos and elaborately costumed stage acts have become part of the popular music business. Artists coming to the Grammys have to choose who to come as—their onstage persona, or a person glamorously dressed to attend a fancy awards ceremony.
Lady Gaga has become so known for outrageous costumes that she would risk disappointing her fans by attending in more traditional attire. Her costumes are so singularly outré that it would difficult for others to wear similar clothes without seeming to imitate her. Her Grammy costumes were on most of the worst-dressed lists that I saw on the internet, but viewing her outfits as clothing rather than as costumes misses the point. She costumes herself onstage and offstage as “Lady Gaga.” Her costumes remind me of the commedia dell’arte tradition, in which characters like Columbina wear masks and heavy makeup, as seen in the carnival photos at left and below. Like Gaga, the Columbina figure was typically portrayed as bold, experienced, and frankly erotic.
Country-western women, on the other hand, are free to dress like glamorous movie stars. Their performance costumes range from jeans to beautiful evening gowns, and in their videos they are much less prone to place themselves in surreal environments calling for surreal costumes. Taylor Swift attended in a lovely gown that would have been appropriate for the Oscar red carpet.
Rock and rap stars have an interesting problem. With some notable exceptions, their performance costumes tend to emphasize anything but fashionable haute couture clothing. They usually perform in some variation of urban street clothing, sometimes made over into something flashy for the stage. So for them to “dress-up” in a way that suggests a Vogue or GQ sense of style might seem to distance them from their fan base.
Some performers solve this problem by not trying to “dress-up” at all. Others manage to put together outfits that retain a sense of “street,” but still look stylish. Unfortunately, in other cases their efforts to “dress-up” end up making them look like night clubbers, pimps, hookers, drug dealers, or people on their way to a prom in a horrible dress or tux. Others, such as Rihanna, have a personal interest in high fashion, and use awards ceremonies as a reason to wear their finest. All of the women mentioned can be seen in the following video:
[Photo of the bird couple by Nahlinse. Photo of the masked woman by Alaskan Dude. Both used under the Flickr Creative Commons License.]
In trying to achieving an elegant effect suitable to a situation, there are many ways to go wrong. At one end there are possibilities that suggest we made insufficient effort. These can range from a sense that we made no effort (wearing rumpled “around the house” clothes) to being underdressed or out-of-style relative to the occasion and everyone else.
There are also many ways to “try too hard” or show questionable taste: ranging from overdone glitz to being decades out of style. Ever since Liberace took glitz over the top in Las Vegas, some entertainers have confused glitz with glamour. This photo of Elvis Presley in his gold lamé tux exemplifies how show-biz costumes can become outrageously glitzy. Such costumes inevitably crossover into kitsch when wore offstage (whatever you think of them onstage).
One of the widely acknowledged exemplars of elegance was the appropriately named Grace Kelly, show in the above photograph at left. You can find several articles on the web discussing how to look or dress like her, and the emphasis is often on a certain simplicity in clothing design, jewelry, color choices, and use of makeup.
On the other hand, “elegance” implies more than mere simplicity. Dictionary definitions of “elegance” often include the word “pleasingly.” For example: “pleasingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner,” or, relative to solving a problem, “pleasingly ingenious and simple.” As Albert Einstein said about science, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
This is one of the great quandaries of style in many fields, including fashion, art, and writing. If you want your work to be elegant, you have to do enough to create a pleasing effect; otherwise you will have failed to achieve your aim. In fashion, true elegance can be stunning in effect. Thus effects that are dowdy, shoddy, or just plain dull fail to qualify.
On the other hand, once you have done enough to achieve an elegant effect, adding elements that seem extraneous can weaken the sense of artful simplicity.
Jessica Biel, a beautiful woman, wore the Prada dress shown at left to the 2009 Oscars. The bow on the front was widely criticized as looking sloppy and extraneous, and some critics were surprised that the normally elegant Prada seemed to have miscalculated in this instance. Yet the outfit cannot be faulted as glitzy became the color scheme and jewelry are so classic and restrained.
For those of us who feel the bow looks “added on,” rather than ingeniously integrated, it is a single design flaw, but nonetheless regrettable in that we feel that we might have admired the dress without the bow. In contrast the addition of rhinestones to Elvis’s gold lamé tuxedo is of little consequence. The gold lamé has already pushed the concept of a formal tux so far into glitz-ville that some extra sparkle just turns it into extreme kitsch—gold lamé made superbly lame.
[Editor’s Note: With this post, DG intern Crystal Hubbard, an aspiring television writer and organizer of the L.A. chapter of Liberty on the Rocks, joins our writing crew.]
“A
woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by
her own image…” wrote art critic
John Berger in his text on visual culture, Ways of Seeing. Berger’s
perception hinges on the word “must,” implying that there is something
inescapable about the female vigilance to appearance; something within her psyche
that compels a woman to preen and then guard the finished product.
But
it is one thing for a woman to watch herself at trivial and mundane events
(though she will) and a completely different matter when she has committed herself to
public service. Suddenly, a decision to wear (or not wear) X-item becomes a
clue as to how she will vote, how she will govern, how she will wield power.
When Senator Blanche
Lincoln (D-Ark.) announced she would support the Senate’s motion to keep health
care reform legislation alive, her historic decision—Lincoln’s was the last,
and necessary, vote to further debate—was marked not with an accompanying
dossier of accomplishments, but by what she was wearing. A relative
unknown, Licoln chose to make her biggest senatorial moment into something almost not worth mentioning. “Her
attire was school-principal prim—blue suit with knee-length skirt,
orange silk scarf tied tightly at the neck,” wrote the WaPo's Dana Millbank. A meekly feminine showing, at best.
One has to
wonder why she chose something so uninspired. A more memorable ensemble would
have communicated that Lincoln realized she had climbed to the pinnacle of
power, and had seized the national spotlight with an outfit worthy of the
moment.
"My
decision to vote on the motion to proceed is not my last, nor only, chance to
have an impact on health-care reform," Lincoln said, having outlasted all the other pork-barrel beggars, and as Millbank
noted, “She took a
streetcar named Opportunism, transferred to one called Wavering and made off
with concessions…”
If there is
further motive—Lincoln is sure to remind her party, in the coming weeks of
debate and deal making, of her solidifying vote—her propriety now becomes
suspect. Following Berger’s observation to its logical conclusion, this may
turn out to be only a penultimate moment for the senator from Arkansas, who gave
a major piece of legislation a much-needed second wind, and may show up in
something significantly more eye-catching the next time Harry Reid is found
holding his breath.
In his same
essay, Berger also said, “men act, and women appear.” Which helps
explain why fashion plays a less important role in the career of a male
politico. Men are physically imposing without having to adorn themselves, and
powerful just by being. If a man fails
in the fashion—or
appearance—department, we do not automatically question his judgment or
ability to govern. We merely chastise him for not being mindful of the moment.
During a 2005 visit to Auschwitz to commemorate the liberation of Jewish
prisoners, then-Vice President Dick Cheney sported an ill-advised parka, that,
as Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan wrote, made him look “like an awkward
child amid the well-dressed adults.” Former interim
UN Ambassador John Bolton also
received the Givhan treatment during his hastily made-up appearance before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in the days leading up to his failed
(permanent) appointment as Ambassador.
…when he settled in before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee this week to answer questions about his record, his
philosophy and his intentions at the U.N., he looked as though he did not even
have enough respect for the proceedings to bother combing his hair -- or, for
that matter, straightening his tie, or wearing a shirt that did not put his
neck in a chokehold. Bolton was one wrinkled suit away from being an insolent
mess.
For men, we playfully mock and move on;
for women, we analyze and critique ad nauseum. It’s one thing for Dick Cheney to look as though he
should be clearing the driveway at Number One Observatory Circle; it’s another
to say that since a woman looks like she could be the offspring of Tammy Faye Bakker we
should question her political acumen. When the contentious results of the 2000 presidential election put Katherine Harris in charge, fair or not, the nation took one collective look and said, “Uh oh.”
We react this way because we count
on women to “continually watch” themselves. And if our elected women aren't watching, if they too are schlepping around their closets like the worst of the boys, then they are—whether they know it or not—signaling that they are an aberration, out of touch with what it means to be a woman, and negligent of one of their most sacred weapons: themselves.
Banana Republic sponsored a photo competition for people dressed in the style of the TV show MadMen. The prize is a walk-on role for an episode of the show, and the semifinalists and now the winner have been announced. Among the semifinalist photos we see portraits of wives and airline stewardesses, but secretaries (now titled “administrative assistants”) and interns seem underrepresented.
In imagining a walk-on role, a temporary secretary or someone interviewing to be an intern would seem to have great potential. Such a walk-on role could be little or no dialogue, and a lovely young woman could provide eye candy for the show’s viewers. Surely a lot of contestants felt this would be the case and submitted photos of themselves as secretaries. One of these is shown at right.
An attractive, unattached female is inevitably the focus of considerable male attention in an office, even if it is limited to looking and fantasizing. The image at right captures such a moment marvelously. The woman who is the subject of her boss’s admiring appraisal no doubt realizes that he will study her figure as she walks away, and she accepts it, though from her expression we can’t tell whether she welcomes it or not.
Back before issues of sexual harassment made office relationships more hazardous, secretaries were often involved in affairs with their bosses or other men in the office. So I find it surprising that photos of secretaries didn’t turn up in the semi-finalists. However, the semi-finalists and winners were determined by public voting, which always make the outcome of a contest unpredictable. A long-standing issue for the TV show Dancing with the Stars has been how its predominately female viewers vote. After the first few seasons the producers feared that no woman contestant would ever win because so many women viewers seemed to simply vote for the man they would most like to have as their dance partner.
The winning MadMen photo is shown at left, and an interview with winner Porter Hovey can be found here. Hovey is a freelance photographer, and she and her sister staged the photo. She portrays a well-dressed suburban mom, sunglasses and all, who is sitting on the steps next to her vintage stroller. One of the questions her interviewer asks is whether she sees herself as a Marilyn or a Jackie, though there doesn’t seem much doubt which one she emulates in the photo.
Contests in which the winner is whoever crosses the line first are easy to understand. The same with sports like basketball where points are scored when the ball goes through the hoop, and the team with the most points wins.
Contests involving subjective judgments are often puzzling. Looking at the photos of the men who are semi-finalists, only the first had a suggestion of narrative. The rest seem like straightforward photos—no feeling of story. Some of the women’s photos are more interesting in a narrative sense, particularly the first, the last, and the winner. In these, the women are seen in staged action. Surely that made a difference in how voters were able to relate to photos.
Perhaps the majority of voters in this contest were women, and if so I can imagine them relating to a wife with responsibilities who is forced to wait for someone, perhaps her late-as-usual husband. A scene like this invites us to imagine what the story is. The photo looks like it could be a genuine street shot, and people were actually stopping and peeking in to see the baby (which turned out to be camera gear).
It would be interesting to know the demographics of the voters. Did women vote for images of women that they identified with? Returning to the lack of secretary photos among the semifinalists, were women voters less inclined to vote for images of women who look as if they might put a married man’s fidelity to the test? I didn’t vote, but as a male I confess that I understood why the man in the first photo was mesmerized.
[Photo of the woman in blue is from Suchacyn’s Flicker Photostream, and is used by permission.]
Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google and ranked by Forbes as the 26th richest man in the world, recently took part in the announcement of Google’s Chrome OS. A number of internet sites have shown more interest in Brin’s footwear and choice of smart phones than in the Chrome announcement.
John Biggs at CrunchGear labels Brin’s footwear as “crazy monkey shoes,” but he also describes how these shoes solved all kinds of problems he himself had been having as a runner. On the other hand, he writes “They definitely make you look like a freak. However, I suspect the
sting of scorn and ridicule is dampened a bit by the fact that the man
has billions and billions of dollars. In my case, people just laugh at
me when I run, and I cry. The sweat hides the tears.”
Matt Buchanan at Gizmodo is likewise fascinated by Brin’s footwear, but he also notes that he “carries a Motorola Droid, not a super secret phone we’ve never seen before.” His post has a fascinating photo of participants taking notes on their various gizmos. Most are using smart phones, one person is holding two devices, and one is using a Moleskine notebook and a fountain pen. Judging from these photographs, geek glamour is more about owning and using the “right tools” then wearing high-fashion clothing, no matter how rich you are.
Brin does have unusual taste in footwear, having before been photographed in Crocs (his choice to wear at the US Tennis Open). And, speaking pragmatically, when you’re working obsessively on a project, there’s something to be said for clothes that look much the same whether you’ve slept in them or not.
I am generally bored by the hysteria, pro and con, that surrounds Sarah Palin. As a bona fide coastal elitist intellectual snob, I can’t see voting for her. But neither do I share the visceral hatred for her or her fans. (Megan McArdle dubs it Palinoia.) I consider her intelligent but ignorant and unworldly. I even liked her convention speech.
That said, the flap over the Newsweek cover shot is as ridiculous as it is predictable. I’ve read enough comment threads over the years to know that conservatives regularly make a point of proudly declaring that their female icons are good looking compared to the old hags on the other side. When did they suddenly adopt politically correct second-wave feminist attitudes toward female beauty, even in the public sphere?
Like it or not, Sarah Palin’s good looks are a big part of her superwoman appeal: governor, earth mother, and sportswoman, with a pretty face and a great body despite all those pregnancies. Besides, I seem to recall some widely circulated topless beach shots of the current commander-in-chief. (Not to mention Condi Rice strutting in those great black boots.) There’s no double standard, except for the one that says if you have bad legs, we don't want to see you in shorts.
There are, of course, problems with the photo, which was taken for Runner's World and was supposed to be embargoed for a year. Nonetheless, it’s clear what Newsweek editors were thinking when they picked it: This is going to sell magazines. (The controversy is a bonus. Free publicity!) Journalism is in survival mode. This is not a time to get squeamish about using the most commercial photo available.
The cries that the cover is “sexist” assume two things: First, that women in public life should not be portrayed as consciously, proudly, sexily attractive. Male politicians can be obviously good looking, but conspicuously attractive women aren’t sufficiently serious. (Maybe we’ll make an exception if you look sufficiently high-end WASP.) And, second, that Newsweek doesn’t like Sarah Palin—an assumption borne out by its cover headline. With different editorial framing, the photo would be read differently. (Pardon my bad mockup. I only had PowerPoint and a very balky iPhoto retouch function to work with.)
I do have one question: Is she wearing panty hose?
Recently up for auction, this Edward Quinn photo of Grace Kelly primping during the filming of To Catch a Thief presents an usual take on a common artistic subject: the beautiful woman at the mirror. From such classics as Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus and Kitagawa Utamaro’s portraits of beauties at their mirrors to this Mark Shaw photo of Audrey Hepburn, the usual composition uses the mirror to give the audience multiple views of the subject: front and back, the face from different angles, the woman as she sees herself and as she is seen by others.
Here, however, we see Grace Kelly entirely from the outside. We do not see the reflection she sees. Rather than a woman of fragments and angles, she appears in a unified view. The photo is a study of surfaces and textures: the shiny, soft hair she is brushing, the lacy gloves, the ornate top, the golden down on her tan arm, the shiny mirror overlaid on the dull trailer. The focal point, framed by her crossed arms is Grace’s face, made even more focal because we know she, too, is looking at it.
The glamour of the toilette points up the difference between male and female audiences (or, to use a phrase encrusted with all sorts of ideological theory, the male and female gaze). For male audiences, portraits of women grooming themselves have traditionally had a voyeuristic quality and were often an excuse for nudity. Projecting himself into the image, the viewer does not generally identify with the subject but with the scene; he imagines not being the subject but being with her. A female viewer is more likely to identify with the subject. She sees herself in the mirror—or longs to.
That feeling was articulated by many of the movie fans interviewed by Jackie Stacey for her study Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. Recalling their youthful filmgoing in the 1940s, women expressed longing and identification when talking about the stars they loved. “It wasn’t Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire, it was me,” said one. Another said, “My favourite was Rita Hayworth. I always imagined if I could look like her I could toss my red hair into the wind…and meet the man of my dreams.”
For women in particular, there is a second kind of glamour of the toilette: the makeover fantasy, which combines the desire for transformation with the idea of being pampered by professionals. “It’s exciting to have important people do stuff for you,” said a nurse from rural Arkansas on ABC’s Extreme Makeover. Hollywood stars not only represent the promise of beauty and fame but also—thanks to their squadrons of makeup artists, hair stylists, wardrobe designers, and, nowadays, everyday fashion stylists—the dream of having an aesthetic entourage on call.
The cryptic phrase “Virtuosity is some evidence of virtue,” occurs in Deirdre McCloskey’s book, The Rhetoric of Economics. Virtue aside, virtuosity is clearly evidence of commitment and hard work. In his book The Talent Code Daniel Coyle describes how repeated, focused practice of specific skills causes the involved neural pathways to be insulated with myelin, ultimately making these pathways as much as 3,000 times more efficient. He repeats what I have read elsewhere, that the usual amount of deep practice necessary to master a difficult sport or musical instrument at a virtuoso level is roughly 10,000 hours or about 10 years. Getting 10,000 hours of practice in ten years would mean spending an average of 2.75 hours every day in deep, focused practice. To do it in fewer years would require more hours of practice each day. Whether we are discussing playing an instrument, playing soccer, skateboarding, or playing tennis, a huge investment of time is required to become a virtuoso player or performer.
One long-term study of music students revealed the factor that most determined their long-term achievement was their initial feeling about how long they would continue to play their instrument. Those that progressed the most assumed they would continue to play their whole lives. This sense of commitment was key to achieving deep concentration when they were practicing, which is crucial to the development of these super-efficient neural pathways.
Coyle also reports that the inspiration to make such a powerful commitment typically comes from outside ourselves. If we see someone who has become successful in a field, then we might imagine that if we worked hard enough, then perhaps we too could be successful. When golfer Se Ri Pak (shown at right) came to the U.S. tour in 1998, she was the only Korean woman, but her extraordinary success inspired others. Ten years later there were 45 Korean women on the tour, and articles were being written about it was that they had come to dominate professional golf. This 2007 article is particularly interesting, discussing the discipline and purpose Korean families expect from children that show some talent. (Korea is also providing some of the best prepared young pianists and violinists.) Obviously, some native ability is required, but it is hard to imagine practicing your skills for 10,000 hours without having seen an example of what all those hours of practice might allow you to do.
In that sense, a sports star can become a glamorous figure to others because the star has achieved the level of mastery that they aspire to attain. But in our media-rich world, if a sports star happens to combine top-level skills and physical attractiveness, then they become even more valuable to sponsors, who hope to capitalize on the star’s commercial appeal. Some examples of sports figures whose looks have made their images highly marketable include David Beckham, Tom Brady, Andre Agassi, Rafael Nadal, Anna Kournikova, and Maria Sharapova (shown in the first photograph above introducing a line of Canon cameras). Sharapova is thought to make considerably more money with endorsements than she does by playing tennis.
In the November 2009 issue of Harper's Bazaar, Tina Fey trades in Liz Lemon's schlumpy cardigans for several seriously gorgeous designer cocktail dresses. They say that the clothes make the man, but in this case, I wonder.
On the subscriber cover (at left), in white Yves Saint Laurent, Fey looks pretty. But she also looks awkward, like a jockish girl all dressed up for a high school dance. Like she can't wait for the shoot to end so she can wash her face and get back into her baggy jeans. It just doesn't feel like Tina Fey. But it's a fashion magazine, so she's in a dress.
Inside, Fey admits that she's not really much for dressing up and that Liz Lemon, the character she based on her early years as a writer in NYC, "has little to no style." She also admits that Lemon's character could use a little more confidence.
This Bazaar cover just looks all wrong to me. But what I wonder is this: who's responsible for that? Should Bazaar have dialed down the glam factor, dressing Fey in something more comfortable and familiar? Or is Fey selling herself short by not totally owning that dress?
[Harper's Bazaar cover image by Alexi Lubomirski.]
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in the morning shower and an 
(cut in half) at night, plus plenty of sunscreen—met with Diane's approval. A Chanel devotee, she recommended 
foundation in Ivoire/Gentle Ivory, for its light-reflecting properties. Rub it in with your fingers, like a moisturizer, she told me.
, a navy with a bit of shimmer. She put a light, pinkish shadow from the corner of each eye toward the middle, then a darker color from the middle outward, blending the two to avoid a sharp line. (
works well.) Don't extend the shadow beyond the eyeball, she instructed, or your eyes will look droopy. She used 
on my top lashes and 
on my bottom lashes.
just under my cheekbone and the apples of my smile, with a touch along the jawline. Finally, the most important element: 
. Dot it on, she advised, and let it dry a minute so it won't run. A bit of light lipstick and some translucent powder finished off the look.
. Unlike cars, shoes are also inexpensive enough to permit people to build diverse wardrobes, changing footwear with season, circumstances and mood.
from 1949 on TV while I walked through the living room. Now, I'm an engineer, so fashion generally slides right past me, but the clothes of all the girls (little women?) activated the pattern recognition part of my brain. It seemed that they were all wearing dresses with inverted triangles over the upper torso. They struck me as looking more like photos I've seen of women from the post-World War II era rather than around the Civil War. It got me to thinking about how art that depicts history is affected by the time of the art itself, as opposed to that of the depicted history. It can be difficult to remove the current-colored lenses that we all peer through.
, available for both men and women.
, citing a magazine's 1939 on the makeover of a charlady. (She wiped off her new face and went back to her regular life.) A makeover or special outfit may make someone look attractive, and looking attractive may make her feel glamorous, but is that all there is to actually being glamorous?
, architectural historian Alice T. Friedman examines mid-century buildings that were designed to make their occupants feel glamorous by framing their lives--literally, with windows and other structural outlines--and giving them a feeling of processing through a special space. 
in which an experience of innocent beauty created an ecstatic moment for him. His poem, Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning, begins:
. Berger’s
perception hinges on the word “must,” implying that there is something
inescapable about the female vigilance to appearance; something within her psyche
that compels a woman to preen and then guard the finished product.
. Recalling their youthful filmgoing in the 1940s, women expressed longing and identification when talking about the stars they loved. “It wasn’t Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire, it was me,” said one. Another said, “My favourite was Rita Hayworth. I always imagined if I could look like her I could toss my red hair into the wind…and meet the man of my dreams.”
. Virtue aside, virtuosity is clearly evidence of commitment and hard work. In his book 
Daniel Coyle describes how repeated, focused practice of specific skills causes the involved neural pathways to be insulated with myelin, ultimately making these pathways as much as 3,000 times more efficient. He repeats what I have read elsewhere, that the usual amount of deep practice necessary to master a difficult sport or musical instrument at a virtuoso level is roughly 10,000 hours or about 10 years. Getting 10,000 hours of practice in ten years would mean spending an average of 2.75 hours every day in deep, focused practice. To do it in fewer years would require more hours of practice each day. Whether we are discussing playing an instrument, playing soccer, skateboarding, or playing tennis, a huge investment of time is required to become a virtuoso player or performer.
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